LICENSE selection is mildly unclear

[DarthHater]

Hello awesome people!

I got roped in to looking at this library due to it being a transitive dependency of another dependency I'm using, and I wanted to describe a bit of the experience around figuring out exactly what license applies to this project:

https://github.com/google/re2j/blob/master/build.gradle#L116-L119

The Go License best I can tell is not a known SPDX identifier, which makes things a bit unclear when first glancing at stuff. Once you dig a bit, it becomes clear it's a BSD3 style license (only one word really changed from the BSD3 license, HOLDER -> OWNER (screencap attached).

At any rate, the LICENSE file itself is on this repo, and then you link to an external LICENSE, the Go License (which is more or less BSD3). It is a little difficult right from the get go figuring out which applies, etc... yada yada yada, I'm not a lawyer, no interest in becoming one :)

It would seem like at least using an SPDX identifier would be a good step, or seeing if there are truly any differences to the BSD3 license (English is tough and HOLDER -> OWNER is probably a big change if you ask the right person).

[sjamesr]

Whether the Go License and the BSD3 license are substantially similar is beyond my pay grade. I'm sure this question has been raised before with the Go project itself.

Maven POM reference says: "using an SPDX identifier as the license name is recommended". It doesn't go so far as to require it, and since there is no SPDX identifier for the license under which this software is distributed, I don't see what change I can make here.

The preamble that RE2J has in its own LICENSE file ("This is a work derived from...") should probably not be in the top of the LICENSE file but maybe in the README.