Option to provide default when license is NOASSERTION

[spenserblack]

For example, a lot of Rust projects (including Rust itself) are dual-licensed, which results in NOASSERTION, even though the repository is licensed.

By providing a default license value (possibly per-language), a user can set a value that makes more sense.

I think it could be something like this:

licenses_default: 'rust:MIT OR Apache-2.0,c:GPL-3.0' # etc...

There is a danger that this can result in inaccurate information if a user isn't careful with this option, though.

[lowlighter]

In #400 there was a fix to display Other instead of NOASSERTION but after re-reading it, I don't think it patched all occurences of licenses display. Maybe just patching the remaining occurence to display Other would be sufficient ?

I can see licenses_default being practical for your own repositories, but in this case I would be tempted to make it per repository rather than per languages (which seems really broad and like you said would be inaccurate and misleading if not handled well)

[spenserblack]

I don't think it patched all occurences of licenses display

Yeah, I'm using v3.11 and the base metrics still report NOASSERTION.

per repository rather than per languages (which seems really broad and like you said would be inaccurate and misleading if not handled well)

The reason I was thinking per-language is because the metric itself is kind of broad, at least for base metrics. It reports prefers, not an exact count. I'm not sure how common my situation is, but, at least personally, I can be confident that almost all of my Rust projects have the same license.

I feel like license preference is often more per-ecosystem than per-repo. That is, I think most people usually stick with the same license for their cargo packages, same license for their npm packages, etc.

But I'm by no means 100% sure about this. I just wanted to bring up the discussion and see if it was reasonable 🙂

[lowlighter]

I don't think it'll be implemented. I can't remember when but there was a change to replace the NOASSERTION text into "No license preference", it's probably good enough

The addition of a new option for such a edge case is probably overkill 😅

[spenserblack]

Agreed 🙂