Highlight unrecognized license

[kidonng]

Description

GitHub detects a repository's license and display it in the info sidebar:

In reality, the license is rarely read and people start to attach all sorts of strings to the license:

• Is it really FOSS?
• Open Source Confusion Cases

There is an easy giveaway: if GitHub can't recognize the license, it displays "View license" or "Unknown" instead. This could mean the license includes undesirable modifications, or it's a less popular license people are likely to be unfamiliar with, both worth further reading.

Could we highlight these cases to make people be aware of potential license issues?

Example URLs

• This repo: MIT license
• Rust: Unknown and 2 other licenses found
• Python: View license

These are all actual open source projects, which also demonstrates that "unrecognized" does not equal to "not open source".

[fregante]

I don't know, I don’t think this is something most people really care about (rather, they'll use it and abuse it anyway unless they're a million dollar company or a million user FOSS project). Feels like drawing attention to it isn't Refined GitHub's place.

[kidonng]

🤷 Yeah, I'm just throwing random ideas. This is likely one of the "if you know, you know" issues.