Relicense under dual MIT/Apache-2.0

[emberian]

This issue was automatically generated. Feel free to close without ceremony if you do not agree with re-licensing or if it is not possible for other reasons. Respond to @cmr with any questions or concerns, or pop over to #rust-offtopic on IRC to discuss.

You're receiving this because someone (perhaps the project maintainer) published a crates.io package with the license as "MIT" xor "Apache-2.0" and the repository field pointing here.

TL;DR the Rust ecosystem is largely Apache-2.0. Being available under that license is good for interoperation. The MIT license as an add-on can be nice for GPLv2 projects to use your code.

Why?

The MIT license requires reproducing countless copies of the same copyright header with different names in the copyright field, for every MIT library in use. The Apache license does not have this drawback. However, this is not the primary motivation for me creating these issues. The Apache license also has protections from patent trolls and an explicit contribution licensing clause. However, the Apache license is incompatible with GPLv2. This is why Rust is dual-licensed as MIT/Apache (the "primary" license being Apache, MIT only for GPLv2 compat), and doing so would be wise for this project. This also makes this crate suitable for inclusion and unrestricted sharing in the Rust standard distribution and other projects using dual MIT/Apache, such as my personal ulterior motive, the Robigalia project.

Some ask, "Does this really apply to binary redistributions? Does MIT really require reproducing the whole thing?" I'm not a lawyer, and I can't give legal advice, but some Google Android apps include open source attributions using this interpretation. Others also agree with it. But, again, the copyright notice redistribution is not the primary motivation for the dual-licensing. It's stronger protections to licensees and better interoperation with the wider Rust ecosystem.

How?

To do this, get explicit approval from each contributor of copyrightable work (as not all contributions qualify for copyright, due to not being a "creative work", e.g. a typo fix) and then add the following to your README:

## License

Licensed under either of

 * Apache License, Version 2.0, ([LICENSE-APACHE](LICENSE-APACHE) or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
 * MIT license ([LICENSE-MIT](LICENSE-MIT) or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

### Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted
for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any
additional terms or conditions.

and in your license headers, if you have them, use the following boilerplate (based on that used in Rust):

// Copyright 2016 rustful Developers
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, <LICENSE-APACHE or
// http://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0> or the MIT license <LICENSE-MIT or
// http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>, at your option. This file may not be
// copied, modified, or distributed except according to those terms.

It's commonly asked whether license headers are required. I'm not comfortable making an official recommendation either way, but the Apache license recommends it in their appendix on how to use the license.

Be sure to add the relevant LICENSE-{MIT,APACHE} files. You can copy these from the Rust repo for a plain-text version.

And don't forget to update the license metadata in your Cargo.toml to:

license = "MIT OR Apache-2.0"

I'll be going through projects which agree to be relicensed and have approval by the necessary contributors and doing this changes, so feel free to leave the heavy lifting to me!

Contributor checkoff

To agree to relicensing, comment with :

I license past and future contributions under the dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license, allowing licensees to chose either at their option.

Or, if you're a contributor, you can check the box in this repo next to your name. My scripts will pick this exact phrase up and check your checkbox, but I'll come through and manually review this issue later as well.

• [x] @Ogeon
• [x] @homu
• [x] @kvikas
• [x] @armed
• [x] @mkovalchik
• [x] @wasi
• [x] @gitter-badger

[Ogeon]

I would like this change to be made, since I want Rustful to be as freely available as possible. It was created to be useful and making it more freely available will just make it more so. I would therefore appreciate it if you all would agree to this.

The contributions from @armed, @mkovalchik and @wasi could possibly be regarded as typos and necessary fixes due to language and std library changes, so I may take the liberty to consider them as non-creative work (I'm still very grateful for your help). Please correct me if I'm wrong here!

@homu doesn't actually write any new content and @gitter-badger has only added a badge to the readme, so I will consider them as agreeing.

That leaves only me and @kvikas as past "creative contributors" and I hope you will be fine with this, @kvikas.

[mkovalchik]

Just to help remove any potential doubt:

I license past and future contributions under the dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license, allowing licensees to chose either at their option.

[Ogeon]

Thank you @mkovalchik. Explicit agreements are always better than assumptions :smile:

[wasi]

same for me:

I license past and future contributions under the dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license, allowing licensees to chose either at their option.

[Ogeon]

This is just a friendly reminder to @kvikas and @armed. I would really appreciate an answer.

[armed]

Forgive me for being late:

I license past and future contributions under the dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license, allowing licensees to chose either at their option.

[Ogeon]

Thank you!

[Ogeon]

Seems like @kvikas hasn't been particularly active for some time. @cmr, do you think I can do the license change, anyway?

[kvikas]

Hey sorry everyone. I wasn't active for some time and was ignoring all mails in gmail's social tab.

I license past and future contributions under the dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license, allowing licensees to chose either at their option.

[Ogeon]

Great! Thank you!