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) 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, use the following boilerplate (based on that used in Rust):

// Copyright (c) 2016 rust-encoding developers
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0
// <LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0> or the MIT
// license <LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>, at your
// option. All files in the project carrying such notice may not be copied,
// modified, or distributed except according to those terms.

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/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] @lifthrasiir
• [x] @SimonSapin
• [x] @ktossell
• [x] @aneeshusa
• [x] @dotdash
• [x] @canndrew
• [x] @alexcrichton
• [ ] @filipegoncalves
• [ ] @CraZySacX
• [x] @kmcallister
• [x] @michaelsproul
• [x] @klutzy
• [x] @skade
• [ ] @bkoropoff
• [x] @cgaebel (conditional on @lifthrasiir)
• [x] @dkhenry
• [x] @aatxe
• [ ] @jedisct1
• [x] @metajack
• [x] @Gekkio
• [x] @jdeseno
• [x] @kyledewey
• [x] @Manishearth
• [x] @mbrubeck
• [x] @mneumann
• [x] @retep998
• [x] @octplane
• [x] @drbawb
• [x] @nagisa
• [x] @phungleson
• [x] @steveklabnik
• [x] @suhr

[kyledewey]

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

[cgaebel]

I am okay with this if, and only if, lifthrasiir is.

[metajack]

Work for me.

[michaelsproul]

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

[retep998]

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

[nagisa]

Provided the project ends up changing the license from MIT to the dual MIT/Apache-2.0, I agree to re-licence my past contributions to the dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license, allowing licensees to chose either at their option.

[aatxe]

I am okay with this if, and only if, lifthrasiir is.

[michaelsproul]

I am okay with this if, and only if, lifthrasiir is.

Just a pedantic side note, but this means that if you're ok with it, then liftrasiir is :stuck_out_tongue:

(you ok <-> lifthrasiir ok) -> (you ok -> lifthrasiir ok)

Edit: Which is perfectly reasonable, I'm just being silly!

[aatxe]

Just a pedantic side note, but this means that if you're ok with it, then liftrasiir is

No, it doesn't. If you wrote "I am ok with this if lifthrasiir is," you would translate it as "lifthrasiir is okay -> I am okay." The same thing applies here. Even if that wasn't the case, iff is commutative.

[Manishearth]

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

[lifthrasiir]

I license past and future contributions under the dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license, allowing licensees to chose either at their option. I'll update entries for @aatxe and @cgaebel as well. (Is this not an issue for your script, @cmr?)

[ghost]

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

[michaelsproul]

@aatxe: Yeah you're right! It's more subtle than I thought.

Taking the original translation:

(me ok <-> lifthrasiir ok)

You can indeed get (me ok -> lifthrasiir ok), which sounds funny because it sounds like your decision determines lifthrasiir's, but that's misleading. What that deduction really says is that if we see your approval (me ok), then we know lifthrasiir must have given his approval, because that's the only case in which your approval is given. I'll shut up now...

[canndrew]

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

[klutzy]

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

[mneumann]

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

[octplane]

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

[Gekkio]

I consent

[suhr]

Sure, why not? (my one commit contribution is old and micro though)

[mbrubeck]

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

[emberian]

@lifthrasiir yeah my scripts don't care.

[dkhenry]

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

[steveklabnik]

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

[ktossell]

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

[drbawb]

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

[skade]

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

[dotdash]

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

[phungleson]

No problem

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

[aneeshusa]

For some reason I wasn't able to check the checkbox myself, but I'm ok with relicensing my contributions under the dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license.

[lifthrasiir]

Okay, so we are left with a handful number of remaining contributors. Ping: @SimonSapin @alexcrichton @filipegoncalves @CraZySacX @kmcallister @bkoropoff @jedisct1

Note: I personally and many others think that Encoding would be better with the relicensing but some others may not agree. Since the checkbox above is not tri-state ("unknown", "agree", "disagree"), please comment to this issue if you disagree. If that happens, we could then talk about what to do next.

[SimonSapin]

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

[alexcrichton]

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

[pradyunsg]

@jedisct1 @filipegoncalves @CraZySacX @kmcallister @bkoropoff

Another mention to grab your attention.

[hsivonen]

@cmr Note that the UTF-8 decoder is based on MIT-only code by an author who doesn't show up in the commit log (Björn Höhrmann). Contacting him about relicensing under dual MIT/Apache License 2.0 has been on my mental todo list, but I haven't gotten around to it, yet. If you contact him, it would be helpful to document the result.

[lifthrasiir]

@hsivonen I have completely forgotten that! The current code bears little resemblance from the original code (I credited the original author only to signify the main idea, and the first incarnation was already significantly deviated in order to support traps), so it might actually make sense to remove the license there. Not sure what to do though.

[hsivonen]

@hoehrmann, what's your take on the last two comments about licensing of the UTF-8 state machine code?

[hoehrmann]

I would need a summary (per mail preferably) of the problem here. I take it one possible question is whether I would be willing to license my UTF-8 decoder code under MIT xor Apache2. That sounds possible, but I would have to read up on that first.

[skade]

@hoehrmann https://github.com/lifthrasiir/rust-encoding/issues/93#issuecomment-241288876 is basically all there is about it.

I have some reasoning here why I didn't relicense my own code under a dual license, most notably that I want my name included in binary distributions and I don't see license compat issues.

https://github.com/skade/leveldb/issues/18#issuecomment-170520139

[kmcallister]

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