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License Texts

Several ORT reporters can include license texts in their output. For example, the PlainTextTemplateReporter can include license texts in the generated open source notices.

ORT suports two main ways to get license texts: License Fact Providers and License File Archives.

License Fact Providers​

ORT includes multiple license fact provider plugins that retrieve license texts from different sources. These plugins can be configured in the config.yml file under the licenseFactProviders section. For example, to use the SPDX License Fact Provider, you can add the following configuration:

ort:
  licenseFactProviders:
    spdx: {}

License fact providers are queried in the order they are defined in the configuration file. By default, ORT uses the following license fact providers:

The latter can be used to add license texts for licenses that are not provided by the other license fact providers. The files must be named according to the license identifier, for example, LicenseRef-custom-license for a custom license text.

License File Archives​

In some situations using the unmodified license texts from the license fact providers is not sufficient, and it is necessary to include the license texts exactly as they are provided by the package maintainers. For this use case, ORT supports archiving license files from the sources of the scanned packages.

Configuration​

By default, the ORT scanner create license file archives in the local directory ~/.ort/scanner/archive. Alternatively, ORT can be configured to store archives on a remote HTTP server, in an S3 bucket, or in a PostgreSQL database. For example, to configure ORT to store license file archives on a remote HTTP server, you can add the following configuration to the `config.yml:

ort:
  scanner:
    archive:
      fileStorage:
        httpFileStorage:
          url: 'https://example.org/archive'
          query: '?username=user&password=secret'

See the reference.yml for more examples of how to configure file storages or the PostgreSQL storage.

License File Patterns​

To decide which files to archive, ORT has a predefined set of license file patterns. To overwrite these patterns, you can add the licenseFilePatterns section to the config.yml file:

ort:
  licenseFilePatterns:
    - 'LICENSE*'
    - 'COPYING*'

Usage​

Currently, only the template reporters can make use of the archived license files. Other reporters, like the CylconeDX or SPDX reporters, only support license fact providers.

See the NOTICE_DEFAULT.ftl example for how to include archived license files in a template report. This example uses the following algorithm when including license texts for dependencies:

  • List the content of all archive license files for the package.
  • Check if any licenses were detected in the source code which were not detected in any of the archived license files, and add the raw license texts from a license fact provider for those licenses.