Right, I don't understand why it doesn't at least look for COPYING or COPYRIGHT as well, those filenames have quite some seniority.
Hell, you can't use GNU Autotools without a COPYING file or it will yell at you until you create it or figure out the incantation to make it ignore the lack of said file. There's still plenty of software out there on github that uses automake/autoconf that wouldn't be properly recognized like this.
"To detect what license, if any, a project is licensed under, we used an open source Ruby gem called Licensee to compare the repository's LICENSE file to a short list of known licenses. However, it's important to note that this approach doesn't count a project as licensed if the README indicates a specific license or if individual project files contain a named license in the code comments."
Of my 13 (original, non-forked) projects on github, 11 state a licence; each one would be immediately found by a human looking at the project; not a single one would be found by the above method.
[1] https://github.com/blog/1964-open-source-license-usage-on-gi...