It is listed as MIT in the package.json, the LICENSE file, and the plugin.xml file. That’s more than reasonable enough to consider it MIT, and that’s where license information would be picked up by e.g. any license-scanning tools.

With the multiple contradictory statements, even just within the README, though, my company’s lawyer would say we can’t use this dependency at all if I showed it to them.

Afaik, the MIT licence grants you the freedom to do whatever you want with this code.

This code is written to share revenue with the author after a threshold, but that's merely the application/code working as intended.

You're free to fork the code, remove this sharing and republish the dependency under another name for example, that's the only thing that MIT is about

The argument in this thread is that you can’t, and you agreed to the other License Agreement. See the root comment, which thinks that this code is not under the MIT license.

And as I said: a feature like this is entirely possible with the MIT licence, because it only addresses the licenced source code, not what said code actually does at runtime. Just read the licence yourself, it's exceptionally short.

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Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

I agree in principle. It is bad form to not try to respect industry conventions.

However, blaming "e.g. any license-scanning tools" is not correct either, since that would be clearly a limitation of the license tool, encoding assumptions of location and standardization that are nothing more than convention. I mean this in the sense that if you went to court and your excuse was "my tool didn't pick that up", you would probably not be victorious, since the terms were laid out clearly for human consumption.

And I agree, a lawyer would not want to use this dependency, but it shouldn't take a lawyer to do that. You are responsible for the legal implications of using anyone else's software.

The point is that licenses and license offers are self-sufficient, a "clarification" from another document simply does not constitute a binding clause in a license.

If you have an offer of the MIT license from the author (as in the LICENSE.txt), then no clarifications or restrictions linked from the home page affect it, and other offers of other licenses are possible but not relevant if you like this particular offer.

The MIT license also clearly states that the software comes with NO WARRANTY (in all caps) and that you use it at your own risk. I don't see what the MIT license has to do with this at all.

Maybe. That’s a very… programmer-like way of looking at licenses, though, and it’s not necessarily compatible with how licenses are interpreted by judges.

There is no indication that anyone was charged to use the software- it was the software that charged them

shady, but then again good enough for apple so..