I wish. Github automatically detects the license, see https://help.github.com/articles/licensing-a-repository/#detecting-a-license

And the text "LGPL-2.1" on the repository is linked to the auto-detected license file in the repository, which is... wait for it... https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/10.1/COPYING, that clearly starts from "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE". I have no idea why their auto-detecting ruby gem thinks it's LGPL.

I could've understand it, if we'd have LGPL in some other file somewhere in the repository and the gem had picked it, but no, it used the correct GPL license file.

I've asked github support to look at it

The reply was

Thanks for reporting this. I've manually triggered a license re-detect, but the LGPL-2.1 license is still being detected from your COPYING.LESSER file.

We use an open source tool called licensee to detect licenses. Would you mind creating a new issue in this repository to report the problem?

https://github.com/benbalter/licensee

Looking at licensee, I found a an issue https://github.com/benbalter/licensee/issues/108 which was closed last October and said, basically, "if both COPYING and COPYING.LESSER are present, use COPYING.LESSER". With a reference to https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html guidelines.

Ack. Overall I don't think this is a big issue as hopefully anyone who cares about the license actually reads it rather than relying on github's interface to tell them.

I've fixed our repository not to have COPYING.LESSER in the root directory next to COPYING, because both files (see gpl guidelines above) mean "LGPL". Now GitHub shows GPL-2.0, which is correct.

thanks