Every relicensed repo now reports NOASSERTION through the GitHub API, and the sidebar reads "Other" instead of naming the license.
This is not a defect in the files. GitHub's detection uses the choosealicense.com corpus, which deliberately excludes NonCommercial licenses. Confirmed directly:
| License |
In GitHub's corpus |
cc-by-4.0, cc-by-sa-4.0, cc0-1.0, apache-2.0 |
✅ 200 |
cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 |
❌ 404 |
So CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 can never be auto-detected there. The LICENSE files are correct and complete — canonical Creative Commons legal text, ~20.8KB.
What it costs
- The license badge is gone from every artifact repo's sidebar.
- Automated license scanners reading GitHub's API see
NOASSERTION rather than a name.
The cheap improvement
Prepend an SPDX identifier to each LICENSE:
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0
It will not change GitHub's badge — nothing will — but SPDX-aware tooling, REUSE, and most SBOM generators pick it up. The four ruleset package.json files already carry the SPDX expression, which covers the npm side.
A fuller option is REUSE compliance (per-file headers plus REUSE.toml), which is probably more ceremony than these repos need.
Worth doing across all 34 relicensed repos in one pass, or deciding the badge does not matter and closing this.
Every relicensed repo now reports
NOASSERTIONthrough the GitHub API, and the sidebar reads "Other" instead of naming the license.This is not a defect in the files. GitHub's detection uses the choosealicense.com corpus, which deliberately excludes NonCommercial licenses. Confirmed directly:
cc-by-4.0,cc-by-sa-4.0,cc0-1.0,apache-2.0cc-by-nc-sa-4.0So CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 can never be auto-detected there. The
LICENSEfiles are correct and complete — canonical Creative Commons legal text, ~20.8KB.What it costs
NOASSERTIONrather than a name.The cheap improvement
Prepend an SPDX identifier to each
LICENSE:It will not change GitHub's badge — nothing will — but SPDX-aware tooling, REUSE, and most SBOM generators pick it up. The four ruleset
package.jsonfiles already carry the SPDX expression, which covers the npm side.A fuller option is REUSE compliance (per-file headers plus
REUSE.toml), which is probably more ceremony than these repos need.Worth doing across all 34 relicensed repos in one pass, or deciding the badge does not matter and closing this.