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Add liccheck to gate CI on dependency license compliance #9

Description

@janhoy

Summary

Add liccheck with an authorised-license
allowlist in setup.cfg so that CI fails if any (transitive) Python dependency carries an
unapproved license (e.g. GPL, LGPL, or ASF Category X licenses).

Motivation

  • Apache Superset uses liccheck to automatically flag problematic transitive deps
  • Known issue: certifi is MPL-2.0 (ASF Category B — allowed with attribution, not
    bundled); liccheck will surface this and similar cases
  • Avoids manual license audits when adding or upgrading dependencies

Proposed changes

  1. Add [liccheck] section to setup.cfg (or a liccheck.ini) with:
    • authorized_licenses allowlist (Apache-2.0, MIT, BSD-*, ISC, Python-2.0, …)
    • unauthorized_licenses blocklist (GPL, LGPL, AGPL, …)
  2. Add liccheck to dev/CI dependencies
  3. Add make liccheck target
  4. Integrate into CI pipeline (fail on unapproved licenses)
  5. Document in DEVELOPER_GUIDE.md

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