Published wheel declares both BSD and proprietary classifiers, and ships no license file

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
68/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
python
Domain
build-system

Research direction

Start with pyproject.toml and inspect the package metadata and wheel-building configuration. Confirm whether the proprietary classifier is deliberate, then build a wheel and inspect its METADATA and dist-info contents. Done means the published metadata consistently identifies Apache-2.0 and the wheel includes the LICENSE file.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug

The published scaleway wheel declares two mutually exclusive license classifiers and ships no license file. Automated license review therefore resolves it to a proprietary license and blocks the dependency, even though this repository is Apache-2.0.

Measured, on 2026-09-03

The repository:

$ gh api repos/scaleway/scaleway-sdk-python
  default_branch: main
  license.spdx_id: Apache-2.0
  LICENSE at the root: 10756 bytes

The published package, every version from 2.9.0 to the current 2.12.0:

$ python -c "from importlib.metadata import metadata; ..."
  License          : 'BSD'
  license_expression: None
  classifier       : License :: OSI Approved :: BSD License
  classifier       : License :: Other/Proprietary License

And the installed distribution ships no license text at all:

$ ls .venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/scaleway-2.11.0.dist-info
  INSTALLER  METADATA  RECORD  REQUESTED  WHEEL

So three sources disagree: the repository says Apache-2.0, the metadata says BSD, and a second classifier says proprietary. A tool has no way to prefer one.

What it costs a consumer

GitHub's dependency-review-action resolves the pair of classifiers to:

BSD-2-Clause AND BSD-3-Clause AND LicenseRef-scancode-proprietary-license

and fails the check:

The following dependencies have incompatible licenses:
  meta/ee-requirements.txt » scaleway@>= 2.9.0
  – License: BSD-2-Clause AND BSD-3-Clause AND LicenseRef-scancode-proprietary-license

AND is the operative word: the resolved expression requires satisfying the proprietary term too, so no allow-list of open licenses can accept it. The only ways out are to exempt the package by name — which accepts an unknown license on trust — or to drop the SDK.

I am building an Ansible collection that uses this SDK as its runtime client, exactly as the official scaleway.scaleway collection does. I would rather not ship an exemption that says "we assume this is fine".

What would fix it

Any one of these, in decreasing order of how much it settles:

  1. license = "Apache-2.0" as a PEP 639 SPDX expression in pyproject.toml, plus license-files = ["LICENSE"] so the wheel carries the text. This makes the package self-describing and needs no classifier at all.
  2. Remove the License :: Other/Proprietary License classifier and correct License :: OSI Approved :: BSD License to License :: OSI Approved :: Apache Software License.
  3. At minimum, include LICENSE in the distribution, so a scanner reading the file wins over ambiguous classifiers.

I am happy to open a pull request for (1) if that is welcome — it is a few lines in pyproject.toml.

One question I could not answer from the outside

Is the Other/Proprietary License classifier deliberate? If some part of the generated code carries different terms from the repository's Apache-2.0, that would be worth stating explicitly rather than leaving to a classifier — consumers who audit licenses will read it as covering the whole package.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
37
Forks
16
Avg merge
3d 18h
Merged PRs (30d)
57

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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