Checking License Compliance

Overview

License compliance is a security concern only in the indirect sense that an unintended license obligation can force you to release proprietary source code, retroactively invalidate a customer contract, or render an M&A transaction infeasible. The cost is legal and contractual rather than exploitative — but the consequence ladder is real.

The most-stepped-on landmine is copyleft contamination: unintentionally including a GPL or AGPL-licensed package in a codebase the rest of which is permissively licensed (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD). The terms of the GPL family say that any project distributing GPL code MUST itself release source under a GPL-compatible license. If your package.json says MIT and one of your transitive deps is GPL-2.0, you may be obligated to either re-license your code or remove the dep.