npm UNLICENSED package reported as The Unlicense license

[jamesbebbington]

We have a private Rails app with a package.json that starts:

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "type": "module",
  "license": "UNLICENSED",
  "dependencies": {

As my-app is a private package that we do not wish to publish or license for others to use, we have followed the npm guidance and specified it as UNLICENSED:

…if you do not wish to grant others the right to use a private or unpublished package under any terms:

{
  "license": "UNLICENSED"
}

However license_scout returns:

+--------+-----------------------------------------------+--------------------------------+-------------+
| Type   | Dependency                                    | License(s)                     | Results     |
+--------+-----------------------------------------------+--------------------------------+-------------+
| nodejs | my-app ()                                     | Unlicense                      | Not Allowed |

This maybe a misunderstanding on my part, but, confusingly The Unlicense (Short identifier Unlicense) is an actual SPDX-recognised software license.

I note that license_scout is meant to support UNLICENSED packages, but either something is not quite working right, or I don't understand how it's supposed to behave.

I have attempted to resolve this by adding an exclusion, to make the 'Not Allowed` result go away:

exceptions:
  nodejs:
    - name: my-app
      reason: This is a reference to the main application package itself

however that just results in this error:

/opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/dependency.rb:58:in `escape': no implicit conversion of nil into String (TypeError)

      Regexp.new("#{Regexp.escape(name)}(\s+\\(#{Regexp.escape(version)}\\))?")
                                                               ^^^^^^^
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/dependency.rb:58:in `uid_regexp'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/dependency.rb:62:in `block in exceptions'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/dependency.rb:62:in `select'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/dependency.rb:62:in `exceptions'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/dependency.rb:79:in `has_exception?'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/reporter.rb:196:in `block in generate_dependency_license_manifest'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/reporter.rb:191:in `each'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/reporter.rb:191:in `generate_dependency_license_manifest'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/reporter.rb:91:in `report'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/lib/license_scout/cli.rb:123:in `run'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/lib/ruby/gems/3.3.0/gems/license_scout-2.6.10/bin/license_scout:23:in `<top (required)>'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/bin/license_scout:25:in `load'
	from /opt/hostedtoolcache/Ruby/3.3.4/x64/bin/license_scout:25:in `<main>'

This above was running on latest Ubuntu in a GitHub action.

I have tried various permutations of adding/specifying a version number, but get the same result.