Comment by mdaniel
5 months ago
I always hate it when license files have "yes, but" language in them because if the license file differs in some non-obvious way, now I have to pay lawyers to interpret it
https://github.com/Paligo/xee/blob/xee-v0.1.5/COPYRIGHT
And that goes double for when there is a separate LICENSE file in the repo https://github.com/Paligo/xee/blob/xee-v0.1.5/LICENSE-MIT
Doesn’t look like “yes, but” language to me. Looks like the code is plain old MIT and the author is doing their due diligence with respect to vendored content in the repository subject to different licensing. Seems like they are being paid by a company to work on this, so it’s not surprising that they actually pay attention to copyright.
The fact that many project maintainers forget about vendored content and haphazardly slap the MIT license (or whatever) verbatim into a LICENSE file doesn’t actually give you a get-out-of-paying-lawyers-free card! If anything, Xee’s COPYRIGHT file gives me more confidence in my legal footing than an unadulterated LICENSE file would. It indicates the maintainer at least has a basic understanding of how copyright applies to their project.