Overly Complex Licensing

Licensing in the world of software can already be complex in itself, but some projects make it very difficult to understand the rights afforded to you. Ideally license terms should be easy to understand at a glance from the top-files of the project, with all requirements and rights understood from a look at the readme and/or license file, but this is not always the case.

Some common indicators of complex licensing include:

• Advising that each file may be under its own license which would need to be checked.
• Advising general ideas or features or under a license, instead of specific locations of code.
• Advising different sections within specific files are under different licenses.
• The use of various different license options without confirming their interaction.

This may not always be done out of malice, some may just be lazy with ensuring things are presented clearly to users, but in other cases the complexity is used to hide issues that work in the project’s favour.