Snapcraft now supports the license: field, and it claims to verify the contents as a valid SPDX expression but ONLY if the `snap` command is available; this doesn't seem to work out of the box. If snapcraft is unable to validate the license, it will just upload the bogus-licensed snap to the store. The store also doesn't validate / ignores the license: field (i.e. we don't extract or verify licensing metadata from it, otherwise it would fail our license expression validation). As a result, it's perfectly possible for a snap with a bogus license: field to make it into the store. When trying to install such a snap, this happens: $ sudo snap install --edge hello-roadmr-1 error: cannot perform the following tasks: - Mount snap "hello-roadmr-1" (164) (cannot validate license "some really bogus license": unknown license: some) To repro this, given a working snapcraft setup and a registered snap name, use this snapcraft.yaml: name: hello-roadmr-1 version: 2020-02-06-04 summary: say hello to this snap which is ok confinement: strict grade: stable description: just a description. license: some really bogus license base: core18 architectures: - amd64 apps: hello: command: echo "hello" parts: empty: plugin: nil then snapcraft build, snapcraft push --release etc (the whole snap publishing shebang), then try to snap install it and you'll get the error I noted above. I noticed snapcraft says this at build time: Could not find '/snap/core/current/usr/bin/snap', validation of the license string will only take place once pushed to the store. which is strange because it also said this *prior* to that: Launching a VM. Launched: snapcraft-hello-roadmr-1 2020-02-06T20:58:24Z INFO Waiting for restart... snapd 2.42.5 from Canonical✓ installed core18 20200124 from Canonical✓ installed snapcraft 3.9.8 from Canonical✓ installed I notice it says /snap/core so probably it's looking for core16 (aka core) but since this is a clean core18-based build, the expected path does not exist