GitHub and Tracking Open Source Licenses
I think GitHub is in a great position to revolutionize open source with regard to license management.
I’d love to see GitHub allow me to optionally declare the license of a public repository.
Then, licenses could follow forks and GitHub could even track and store click-wrapped copyright releases that are “signed” in your pull requests.
I can imagine a scenario where GPLv2 code is automatically flagged if attempted to be pushed into an MIT-licensed repo, but practically I think that level of intelligence is a long way off and probably not worth the bookkeeping headache.
I like this idea. It would be interesting if applied to submodules (though they’d need to fix submodules first…), though it couldn’t reasonably do more than warn about it: for example, I have a project (txsuite) which itself is new-BSD licensed, but is essentially just a build skeleton for a whole bunch of other things. I don’t—at this point, anyway—distribute them as a unit, and there are some interdependencies (obviously; there’d be little point otherwise), but principally it’s a collection of separate projects collected together for convenience. I do work with other stuff where a great big “Awooga! This is GPLv3!” would be rather handy, though…
