There's a twisty set of control page (templates scripts validtions) that use METAL macros to include various bits. I think the description_of_change stuff is used by sword (an alternative publishing API that the oerpub code uses to push stuff to cnx.org). It might be deadcode, though, I can't find any other code accessing it. There's no obvious use of the other license_* bits, either. I added the _name version on the assumption that I would probably be editing whichever template defined the macros that this one uses, and that template used the license_* vars.
either.