The current way of handling licenses - a manually maintained list of dependencies and their licenses - does not work very well.

The dependencies we consume might declare the same license under many different names so the goal is to eliminate this and enforce one canonical name for a given license but in practice even the files we maintain may use different names. And having a local source of truth means that if a license changes between releases we have no way of telling.

The intended result is better achieved by making the licenses-plugin translate the declared licenses to their canonical names, and instead of maintaining a record for every dependency the current config files can be used just to correct the edge-cases the plugin cannot process (e.g. if no license was declared).