Please provide LICENSE file

[Mike-Crowe-BrightSign]

I've been trying to work out what license Clara is under. The "single-include" contains license text from clara_textflow.hpp:

// This work is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause license.
// See the accompanying LICENSE file, or the one at https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause

But I can't see a LICENSE file in the repository.

The separate clara.hpp contains no license information at all.

I suspect that Clara is also under the 2-clause BSD license, but I think this needs to be made completely clear.

Thanks.

Mike.

[bearcage]

This'd be helpful for me too — I'd like to contribute more, but it's hard to if I don't know the license I'm doing that under!

It looks like catch is under the boost license and textflow is bsd 2-clause, so I'd guess clara will wind up under one of those two as well, but it'd be great to have that spelled out someplace.

[philsquared]

Yes, it should be BSD-2 0 and I've now pushed a license file. Sorry about that - I don't know how I missed it before!

I'm thinking of either moving Catch2 to BSD-2 as well, or Clara and TextFlow to Boost - so they're all on the same license. It's a bit confusing having them on different licenses (although, my understanding is, as the copyright holder I can relicense in this way).

[bearcage]

Thanks much, I appreciate it!

I'm obviously not a lawyer either, but AIUI that's right -- IIRC you can't revoke the old license for anyone who downloaded it when it was licensed that way, or something along those lines, but afaik you can change it at will going forward.

EDIT: 129e877fe039e5ebdb8002347eb9633936d7b27b introduced the LICENSE file, if anybody's looking for it :-)

[Mike-Crowe-BrightSign]

Thanks for adding the license information.

IANAL, but I believe that if you've accepted any non-trivial contributions to the affected code then you cannot unilaterally switch from BSD-2-clause to BSL-1.0 or vice-versa since each license explicitly states that the text of the license must be preserved. You might be able to put the code under both licenses. Presumably that's already effectively what happens in Catch2, since it is licensed under BSL-1.0 but incorporates code that is under BSD-2-clause.

Of course, if you can get the agreement of all the contributors (i.e. copyright holders) then you can change the license to whatever they agree to. If you can get them to respond then I doubt that this would be particularly difficult since the licenses are so similar. But, if you're going through that upheaval anyway it might be worth considering other licenses with specific trademark and patent wording such as Apache.

But, again, IANAL. I'm sure there are people that have far more expertise in this than I do that you could consult.

[philsquared]

I've gone with the easier option of relicensing Clara (and TextFlow) under Boost. There have been no non-trivial contributions to either (you might argue that @horenmar has made non-trivial contributions to Clara, but he is definitely in agreement - although would be nice if he comment to that effect here so it's on the record :-) ).

Clara is now licensed under the Boost Software License.

[horenmar]

I went through the history since the big 1.0 rewrite and there are only 2 external contributions:

• 0fe40b1328762ed8d4aa99894351d4b2c6c39d80 by @ronen, updating readme
• 8579b55260bd2c4e3b038d7ff3854141fa7c22d7 by @BMBurstein, fixing windows test

Neither touches the actual implementation of Clara, so it should definitely be OK to relicence it. It could also be argued that both of these count as trivial.

[philsquared]

Thanks @horenmar - yes that was my reading, too - except there were quite a few (albeit infrastructural) commits by yourself - hence wanting your input here :-)

So I'm going to close this now.

[philsquared]

Thanks @ronen - and, for the record, when we say "trivial" we don't mean "inconsequential" :-)

[ronen]

[redoing my comment actually logged in to the correct account]

For the record I agree my contribution was trivial :)

[philsquared]

Don't worry - it all worked out anyway (except now my reply precedes your comment - oh well!)

[BMBurstein]

Same here