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I have a software that uses some MIT and Apache licenses. The source code is not open source and all the third-party software is downloaded from Nuget as a reference (I'm not including the source code in my project or modyfing it). Do I have to include some license information somewhere in my project or documentation?
It might seem as a trivial question, but I'm looking for direct answer for an hour now without success.
If you don't store the code bin your repository, then you don't need to have a specific mention of the license of those dependencies.
However, when you distribute a binary that contains (compiled) code of those dependencies, then you must must mention those dependencies and their licenses either in the documentation that comes with the binary or in a screen with licensing information that is part of the binary.
NuGet's official docs have this section on including a license expression or file, if you're packing an SDK style project. License expression won't work for you, because I believe only open source licenses are included in the SPDX specification.
Basically, in your project file, you'll need a property which tells NuGet what the path to the license file will be once packed, and an item to tell NuGet which file on disk to put in the package.
<PropertyGroup>
<PackageLicenseFile>LICENSE.txt</PackageLicenseFile>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<None Include="licenses\LICENSE.txt" Pack="true" PackagePath=""/>
</ItemGroup>
If you're still using a nuspec file, this page explains how to do it.
