There is a meta/conf/licenses.conf file which refers to LICENSE_PATH as being the variable to add to if you want to add additional directories to be searched for generic license files; the commit message for poky revision cb91ef9310a2450650ec880be6f0fc3a6e2d4a23 also mentions this same variable. Unfortunately LICENSE_PATH is only referred to in a comment in licenses.conf and nowhere else, so it doesn't do anything - license.bbclass seems to be reading LICENSE_DIR for extra paths. Additionally conf/licenses.conf doesn't appear to be referred to anywhere either so I'm not sure what the purpose of this file is. (If LICENSE_DIR was the intended variable name, I'm not sure if that's a great name either given that we already have LICENSE_DIRECTORY which is used for another purpose.)
Patch sent: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.openembedded.core/28088
Fix merged to master: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=4f82c4eaf7a6944c3d1bb17fd6972ea035b6a27c I am about to send a patch to update the documentation as well.
Verified on master branch. Latest commit ID: 2c3e8280e67721d42d4be48a8e2c1e9ce9bb89fd