I’d been planning on using LinearOperators.jl for a project but discovered that it is licensed under the GPL, which I am allergic to for various unimportant reasons. I guess I’m kind of used to Julia libraries being licensed under MIT.
Anyway, to avoid this in the future, I think it would be nice if Pkg.add() displayed the license one was agreeing to before installation. Is this information available to the package manager? I tried reading Base.Pkg, but it doesn’t make much sense to me.
You could always try (using whatever text editor you wish)
julia> cd(Pkg.dir("pkgname"))
shell> vim license # or LICENSE.md
To access the license, most registered packages should have that in their package directory.
Perhaps you should open a feature request at
https://github.com/StefanKarpinski/Pkg3.jl
(note: I did not check past ones, maybe it came up already)
Seems like a good idea, prompting one for each type of license in a project file seems like a good feature for the new package manager.
Prompting for non-MIT licenses only would problably suffice as MIT is (kind of) the expected standard license.
Actually, it would be nice if there was a way to configure which licenses were acceptable or not by default. I imagine most medium-to-large organizations that consume open source have a vetted list of licenses that they’re ok with.