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Determining the governing license(s) for a piece of software is a large part of the work done by packagers and package reviewers. We want to make certain that we have permission from the authors to build, redistribute, and (if necessary) modify their software.
Licensecheck
The licensecheck package (which you will have installed if you followed the directions in setup) can detect many of the licenses commonly used by open source projects. Run it like this:
licensecheck -r [directory]
where directory will typically be the result of unpacking an upstream
tarball. Examine the output to find the relevant license(s).
The license field
applies only to the contents of the final binary RPM, so you can ignore files
that are only used during the build, such as config.guess or test-only
files. Note that Fedora uses SPDX License names.
Multiple licenses
If more than one license is in play, then all of them must be listed in the
License: field, separated by AND; e.g., MIT AND BSD-2-Clause. In that
case, the
packaging guidelines
require the spec file to contain a comment explaining which files are covered
by which licenses. It is also acceptable to include a file in %license that
explains the license situation.