Question about declaring/checking licenses in dependent gems

[Benjamin Fleischer]

(previously posted at https://groups.google.com/d/topic/license-finder/Sb7xxOIV61E/discussion but this is possibly more correct)

I recently submitted a PR to the heroku_12factor project https://github.com/heroku/rails_12factor/pull/11 which I used LicenseFinder on to identify the licenses.

Do you have any idea how licenses inherit from one another and if code should include that information? 

e.g. if I license my gem as MIT and it has a runtime dependency on a gem that is BSD, should I note that?  If GPL? WTFPL?

See for example the licenses I've come across while checking gem releases https://github.com/bf4/gemproject/blob/master/license_usage.csv

-Benjamin

p.s. While googling about this, I found project and related paper to what looks like a pretty rigorous license finder tool (alas, AGPLv3+) so I thought I'd share in case you haven't seen it

http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/papers/dmg2010ninka.pdf (also related http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/papers/dmg2010_icpc.pdf )

http://ninka.turingmachine.org/

https://github.com/dmgerman/ninka

http://sanacl.wordpress.com/tag/ninka/

I also found this stackoverflow question with interesting related questions http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15325405/are-open-source-libraries-that-are-dependencies-of-another-open-source-library-a

* cool chart http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html

* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1647059/what-exactly-are-the-rules-for-using-gpl-lgpl-bsd-software-interally-in-the-en?rq=1

* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10510674/lgpl-gpl-apache-bsd-mit-license-and-its-usage-in-a-non-open-source-proprieta?rq=1