Enhancement request: Refine License Category - Copyleft Limited

[mjherzog]

Problem
The current ScanCode/DejaCode License Category of 'Copyleft Limited' is defined as:
"A license that requires you to redistribute source code, including your changes, and also to provide attribution for the software authors. Your obligation to redistribute source code, including proprietary code linked with code under this license, is limited according to license-specific rules."

This category covers two types of Copyleft licenses that are more permissive than the original Copyleft/GPL-based Copyleft category but these types are quite different from a license risk perspective. The two types could be described as:

• Copyleft - Library: where the software unit subject to Copyleft conditions is a library. The most common examples are variants of LGPL and GPL with a Classpath Exception;
• Copyleft - File: where the software unit subject to Copyleft conditions is a file. Common examples, are variants of MPL, EPL and other so-called "public licenses".

Benefits
Many organizations have license usage policies that are distinct for the Copyleft - Library and Copyleft - File types. Replacing the current Copyleft Limited category with these more granular categories should make it much easier to apply basic license usage policies based on License Categories.

Solution
The solution is to update the licenses in the current Copyleft Limited category by:

• Assigning each license to one of the new categories in a test dataspace. There are 330 licenses as of March 9, 2026.
• Communicating the planned change to the ScanCode community. It is important to actually show people the proposed recategorization by license rather than just the concept.
• Planning the implementation with enough lead time to minimize disruption to the ScanCode community.

[mjherzog]

ORT is a project that embeds ScanCode and uses ScanCode License Categories - https://github.com/oss-review-toolkit/ort-config/blob/main/license-classifications.yml. Since we would provide the updated License Category data for licenses in ScanCode, this change should have minimal impact on ORT, but there may be more impact on organizations using ORT data in their license usage policies.

[DennisClark]

I will define the new categories in DejaCode reference data and update the assignments on the 330 licenses. I will also create a Report in DejaCode for licenses by category so that we can review the changes and communicate them.

Basically I think my approach will be to rename the Copyleft Limited category to Copyleft Library and modify its description and then create the Copyleft File category and then update the assignments on all the licenses that should have that new one.

[mjherzog]

@DennisClark I think that we need to do this in some separate dataspace, not Reference, because of the downstream impacts.
I expect that we can figure out how to automate updating Reference after we have completed the prep work.

[DennisClark]

OK, I'll create a new dataspace for this purpose.

[DennisClark]

new dataspace Categories created in DejaCode enterprise.

[DennisClark]

work-in-progress. Reviewer users created. Categories redefined. Some licenses updated, with many more to go.