Using License Compliance to manage licenses of dependencies
It can be easy to lose track of what software licenses are used by your project’s various dependencies. It’s also easy to forget which licenses are compatible with your project’s overall license, and which licenses should be excluded for various reasons. This is where GitLab’s License Compliance feature can help out.
Understanding License Compliance
Most open-source libraries are released under a software license. There are hundreds of licenses available – though only 20 or so are commonly used – and the legal details of each vary considerably. If you use a third-party library in your project, you must make sure that the library’s license and the license under which you intend to release your software are compatible with each other. If they are incompatible, you must replace that dependency with an alternative library that uses a friendlier license.
What do we mean...