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coobird / thumbnailator

Thumbnailator - a thumbnail generation library for Java
MIT License
5.08k stars 780 forks source link

Offer thumbnailator under a standard open source license #172

Closed chuckdumont closed 3 years ago

chuckdumont commented 3 years ago

Expected behavior

thumbnailator is available under one or more of the standard open source licenses (e.g. Apache 2, MIT, etc.).

Actual behavior

thumbnailator is only available under a proprietary license. This restricts it's use since many commercial products that use open source code don't want to deal with proprietary licenses. I, for one, would love to use this package, but the company I work for won't approve it due to the license.

Steps to reproduce the behavior

N/A

Environment

N/A

coobird commented 3 years ago

Have you taken a look at LICENSE? Thumbnailator is licensed under an OSI-approved license.

chuckdumont commented 3 years ago

I did take a look. I see a copyright statement and the terms of the license. Note that it's not an issue with the license terms. The terms you specify sound perfectly reasonable to me. It's a book keeping issue. Large companies like mine don't want to pay their lawyers to review and approve hundreds of individual licenses. They have a list of licenses that have been pre-approved and can be used without further review. Anything not on the pre-approved list triggers a time consuming review request process and is generally discouraged, particularly for one-off licenses like yours. Even if the text of the license is substantially the same as an existing approved license, it still requires a lawyer to make that determination and approve the license. Because getting new licenses approved can be cumbersome and time consuming, many programmers (myself included) will simply look for alternatives that have pre-approved licenses.

coobird commented 3 years ago

It's the MIT License. Not sure why this is considered a "one-off" license.

... Unless you're referring to the header line included at the top of LICENSE? If that's the case, I can consider removing it.

coobird commented 3 years ago

Pushed change to master which hopefully is a bit more clear that Thumbnailator is released under the MIT license.

chuckdumont commented 3 years ago

That actually makes all the difference. Note that header that github now displays when viewing the license. Thanks much.

chuckdumont commented 3 years ago

@coobird - any forecast on when we can get a new release with the license update?

coobird commented 3 years ago

@chuckdumont Hopefully in a day or two.