The LICENSE or COPYING file in the repository wins, obviously. Also, not everyone would set the setting. But it's a start.
Just seems like a source of potentially expensive misunderstandings.
Sourceforge and Google Code have had these license options available to show on project pages forever. I think it'll be fine.
Fair enough!
One obvious solution is for github to autodetect the license if a LICENSE file is present. This will work in most cases, most people just copy&paste one of a small set of licenses.
Then you send a quick note to the owner of the repository to ask him what's up.
As a guy who sends these notes, the response rate drops very quickly if the project hasn't been touched in the past year, and this is not uncommon.
So you end up with a lot of badly marked or unmarked open source, which isn't great.
The license/copying file that is actually distributed with the code still is what you have to go by.
Without license information you MUST assume full copyright sadly.
I agree.
Sadly, we also run into plenty of cases distributing LICENSE files that don't match file headers, etc.
Yeah it's just unfortunate. It's effectively like attempting to distribute a broken library. People simply can't use it, and even though it may have had the workings of a good solution for many people, you're just not going to get any users/contributors. shrug