Add a `license family` concept to group license matches together

[AyanSinhaMahapatra]

Short Description

There are often license notices where a short license intro is followed by a much larger license notice right after (or in a different ecosystem/legelese specific file):

For example:

/***********************************************************************

  A JavaScript tokenizer / parser / beautifier / compressor.
  https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2

  -------------------------------- (C) ---------------------------------

                           Author: Mihai Bazon
                         <mihai.bazon@gmail.com>
                       http://mihai.bazon.net/blog

  Distributed under the BSD license:

    Copyright 2012 (c) Mihai Bazon <mihai.bazon@gmail.com>

    Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
    modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
    are met:

        * Redistributions of source code must retain the above
          copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
          disclaimer.

        * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
          copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
          disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
          provided with the distribution.

    THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER “AS IS” AND ANY
    EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
    IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
    PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER BE
    LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY,
    OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO,
    PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR
    PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
    THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR
    TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF
    THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF
    SUCH DAMAGE.

This is detected as bsd-new AND bsd-simplified where the introductory license statement is Distributed under the BSD license: is detected as bsd-new.

We can have a license-family attribute in the .LICENSE files for versioned licenses so we can resolve and merge short license statements like these with a larger text and simplify and correct the license expression.

For example, here for the bsd family of licenses we will add a data field:

license-family: bsd

And use this as a basis in LicenseDetection creation while merging multiple matches.
We could also potentially group license matches similarly using the license family concept.

This can also be done for example when the package manifest has a short license statement but the NOTICE/LICENSE file for the package .

Possible Labels

• new feature

Select Category

• Enhancement
• Add License/Copyright
• Scan Feature
• Packaging
• Documentation
• Expand Support
• Other

Describe the Update

How This Feature will help you/your organization

Possible Solution/Implementation Details

Example/Links if Any

Can you help with this Feature

[Jayant-kernel]

@AyanSinhaMahapatra
This is a really smart idea! I've run into this exact problem where ScanCode detects something like bsd-new AND bsd-simplified when it's really just one BSD license with an intro statement.

** examples I've seen:**

In NuGet packages, the .nuspec file often just says "BSD License" but the actual LICENSE.txt file has the full text. Right now ScanCode treats these as separate detections when they're really the same thing.

Same thing happens in JavaScript files - there's usually a short comment at the top like "Licensed under MIT" and then the full MIT text is in a LICENSE file.

[AyanSinhaMahapatra]

@Jayant-kernel thanks for your interest, but please contribute instead to an issue which is not assigned to someone. Assigned issues are usually for the maintainers for some reason or the other.

But you're more than welcome to add additional context here or give your ideas too.