Why does the Declared license for a Java component have both a valid license and See-License-Clause?

The Declared license for Java components is obtained from the POM file of the component (or a parent POM).

Within the POM, each tag available under the license object(<licenses></licenses>) is individually resolved. In some cases there may be more than one tag which produces multiple declared license results.

In the example below there are two tags within the license object.

<license>
<name>Apache License, Version 2.0</name>
<url>LICENSE.txt</url>
</license>

• <name></name> tag: Based on the content("Apache License, Version 2.0") available in the "name" tag, that element is resolved to "Apache-2.0".
• <url></url> tag: Based on the content("LICENSE.txt") available in the "url" tag, that element is resolved to "See-License-Clause".

The "See-License-Clause" is meant to alert the user that an additional cross-check should be performed for any licenses/licensing information provided in the respective path or file, which might be unavailable in the licenses list provided in the POM.