I don't think it is getting ugly at all. s/w is considered private copyrighted work that is protect against copying unless otherwise noted; so, some sort of copyright and licensing must be stated and granted if it is to be shared and used by others.
Open source is not the same as FreeWare.
Open source usually comes with copyright and licensing requirements/restrictions that allows it to be copied and shared and often does not allow it to be used in certain ways.
So you can't just copy open source software and use it anyway you want.
That is the price you pay for being able to start with someone else's s/w code vs having to start from scratch.
People have different views on the s/w that they create and the license they choose allows them to choose how their s/w can or cannot be used by others.
In this case it looks like it might be easy to clean things up by adding some missing notices and copyrights.
The tricky part will be if the the library is using code from both GFX and and ILI9341 since they have different licenses.
It may be that the combined work will have to become BSD vs MIT since I think BSD is a bit more restrictive, assuming the MIT licensing actually allows that.
(Although I just created an issue in the Adafruit ILI9314 library asking them to clarify the licensing)
btw, I faced a some licensing & copyright issue when I created my arduino hd44780 library.
This was mainly because the Arduino team (Including Adafruit) was so sloppy with their licensing and copyrights.
This was particularly an issue on the LiquidCrystal library. I pushed hard on both Arduino and Adafruit to clean up their copyrights and licensing on their code & libraries and for the most part they have.
In my case I was having to dance around a bit since they originally didn't have any licensing or copyright notices for LiquidCrystal when I started hd44780.
They had a very vague and general license file for Arduino code but that license file was never included with the Arduino IDE distribution - it was only in the repository - so nobody that had the IDE would ever be able to see it - which does not comply with the GPL/LGPL requirements.
My eventual solution was to look at their intent and went with that until they updated their licensing.
I now also include a licenseInfo.txt file that provides a detailed description of the licensing and the history of the licensing of the original sources.
You can see in my repo here:
https://github.com/duinoWitchery/hd44780I am a big believer in s/w copyrights and licensing and believe that ALL s/w should be very clear as to its licensing and the lineage of the code, including arduino libraries and sketches.
One of the worst licenses of all is Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 as that license is not compatible with anything but itself. It was never intended to be used on a work that is piece of something else. So legally you can't ever create a public/shared project that uses it in something like an adrduino project (even if the CC-BY-SA 3.0 work is just a library) since CC-BY-SA 3.0 is not compatible with other licenses like GPL/LGPL code due to some of the attributions required by CC-BY-SA 3.0 that are forbidden by GPL/LGPL.
CC-BY-SA 4.0 was created to work around this by allowing the work to be re-licensed as GPL/LGPL.
--- bill