Feature request: Support custom licenses

Problem

It seems that currently Projen supports following licenses:

• Apache-2.0
• MIT
• MPL-2.0

… but for internally distributed (within a company) constructs / projects one should be able to set the license to something else (proprietary license).

Proposed solution

One idea could be allowing to specify the license as string:

project.license = `COWBOY LICENSE
This is a custom proprietary license. 
Only people wearing cowboy hats can use this project. 
Beware of our scary legal team.`;

Proposed Workaround

For a workaround one could use in .projenrc.js:

project.gitignore.exclude('LICENSE');

… but that doesn’t work since Projen applies !/LICENSE after that:

So at least having some way of “forcing” manual project.gitignore.exclude operations to be appended at the end would solve the issue.

[Chriscbr]

Maybe there could also be an option to support no license, and have it automatically set private: "true" in the package.json to avoid unintentionally publishing a package. (Or this flag could be provided by a separate option)

[jmourelos]

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

Yeah I guess I wouldn’t mind using ‘NO_LICENSE’ to avoid confusion, but it’s fair that a flag works just as well. Or putting all related fields in a licenseOptions like you suggested. I don’t really have a strong opinion here.

I don’t have a strong opinion either, so I will just let it stay as it is currently. I set the PR to ready for review.

Any other missing placeholders substitutions should definitely be added! But whenever possible, these fields should be passed from the rest of the project options – not provided via license-specific options. This way the user only has to specify properties at the project level (such as the author name, year, etc.), and the fields will automatically propagate to all appropriate files, including the license.

Definitely, I was thinking of cases where the information would be specific for the license, but I can see that that is not very likely.