Use of multiple licenses in a single GitHub repo

Question

My organization wants me to standardize several datasets using a common data format before we use them. Namely, two datasets with their own GitHub repos have different licenses (AGPL 3.0 and CC-BY-4.0 respectively). If I were to put both standardized datasets into a single repo, which license would I choose for my LICENSE file? I read in this question that you can only have a single license per LICENSE file. So is it possible to do something like so,

# the GitHub repo
LICENSE_FOR_DATASET_A   # contains AGPL 3.0 license
LICENSE_FOR_DATASET_B   # contains CC-BY-4.0 license
README.md               # other repo files...

Would this be an acceptable workaround or must I have separate repositories per license?

Answer 1

So is it possible to do something like so,

# the GitHub repo
LICENSE_FOR_DATASET_A   # contains AGPL 3.0 license
LICENSE_FOR_DATASET_B   # contains CC-BY-4.0 license
README.md               # other repo files...

Yes, that is possible, but you will need to have some way to indicate which files belong to dataset A (and thus are subject to the AGPL) and which files belong to dataset B.

As there is not actually a legal requirement to have a LICENSE files at the top-level of your repository, you could also go for a repository layout like this

|-- Dataset A
| |- LICENSE   # contains AGPL 3.0 license
| |- ...       # content of dataset A
|-- Dataset B
| |- LICENSE   # contains CC-BY-4.0 license
| |- ...       # content of dataset B
|-- README.md  # Other files that don't belong to either dataset

A totally different option is to put your entire repository under the AGPL 3.0 license. This is possible because the CC-BY 4.0 license allows you to use a different license for a transformed work (like, after changing dataset B to the common format).