Unknown LicenseRef issue with a lot of packages

[jebeaudet]

Hi!

As can be seen in clearlydefined/curated-data#29516 and on other popular libraries like jetty, there's an ongoing issue where a lot of popular packages are being detected with a LicenseRef-scancode-unknown-license-reference.

I thought it might have been a scancode issue but it seems like the issue is on the usage of the tool by clearlydefined. Digging into recent commits, it seems like it might be caused by clearlydefined/service#1149, and its related merged pull requests. This comment thread on a PR actually raises the same issue that I'm reporting here.

This issue is causing a lot of problems in our automated license check tool since LicenseRef-scancode-unknown-license-reference is obviously not in our allow list.

Thanks for looking into this!

[elrayle]

@jebeaudet Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We will take a look at how we call scancode.

[qtomlinson]

The configuration options for running ScanCode in ClearlyDefined, as listed in the cdConfig.js file, include --package and --license, which are discussed here.