What should I put in the license field of package.json if my code is only for use by the company I work for?
node.jspackage.jsonnode.js Problem Overview
NPM 2.11.3
I'm building a library in Node. This library is only for use by the company I am currently working for. I think this means that the license is "None". But when I npm init it wants me to use an SPDX License. "None" or "Unlicensed" are not valid options.
npm WARN package.json [email protected] license should be a valid SPDX license expression
There is some discussion around this on the NPM GitHub issue tracker but I can't find anything that definitively answers this. Perhaps NPM doesn't support this concept, but that seems odd.
What should I put for this field in this case? I'd like to get rid of the npm warnings related to this.
While the docs say that UNLICENSED is valid, it still gives a warning:
$ cat package.json | grep licen
"license": "UNLICENSED",
$ npm install
npm WARN package.json data_monitoring_api@0.1.0 license should be a valid SPDX license expression
node.js Solutions
Solution 1 - node.js
Use UNLICENSED per the npm docs:
> Finally, if you do not wish to grant others the right to use a private or unpublished package under any terms: >
{
"license": "UNLICENSED"
}
This is not to be confused with the license that was confusingly called "The Unlicense".
Solution 2 - node.js
> at the time of writing UNLICENSED (see the code sample in the > question) was not an option please see jcollum's answer
Adding private to package.json will help:
"private": true
Solution 3 - node.js
On the second column of the table found on this link, https://spdx.org/licenses/, you can see all the different SPDX format to used in your package.json.
The name of the column is Identifier just in case. Thanks and hope it helps.
Solution 4 - node.js
For me whatever license I put in the code did not work. But then I figured out, that there is a invalid package.json in the parent directory. After removing it, this solved all the issues.