This PR is to discuss licensing of this and other Prawn repo. Currently, it is triple-licensed where the user may choose any one of the following:
GPLv2
GPLv3
A custom variant of Matz's (fairly permissive) Ruby license, which replaces the word "binary" with "executable"
There has been previous work done to move to the MIT License which is used by Rails and is widely regarded as the most permissive. Relicensing requires consent from all contributors (currently 125), in a previous issue consent was obtained from about 70 of them.
Why MIT?
TLDR; it makes life easier for users, esp. those working at smaller companies, and makes less work for lawyers.
First principle is that we want Prawn to be used as broadly as possible. If Google or Meta uses it, great--hopefully they will upstream any bug fixes they find. Even if they don't, more exposure/usage is good.
Second, the current Prawn license is similar to the BSD license and similar-ish to MIT already. It does not prevent EvilCorp from using Prawn internally, or even distributing the code either as (a) open source, or (b) in any form, if they rename "Prawn" to something else like "Prewn". (In our SaaS-oriented world distribution is less important anyway.)
More than anything the current license is non-standard, which makes it a pain for every user company to legally review, even if the lawyers ultimately find it to be usable. Legal review is much more costly for smaller companies that it is for EvilCorp's infinite army of lawyers. So this is the key driver for going MIT.
Related to this issue: https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn/issues/625
This PR is to discuss licensing of this and other Prawn repo. Currently, it is triple-licensed where the user may choose any one of the following:
There has been previous work done to move to the MIT License which is used by Rails and is widely regarded as the most permissive. Relicensing requires consent from all contributors (currently 125), in a previous issue consent was obtained from about 70 of them.
Why MIT?
TLDR; it makes life easier for users, esp. those working at smaller companies, and makes less work for lawyers.
First principle is that we want Prawn to be used as broadly as possible. If Google or Meta uses it, great--hopefully they will upstream any bug fixes they find. Even if they don't, more exposure/usage is good.
Second, the current Prawn license is similar to the BSD license and similar-ish to MIT already. It does not prevent EvilCorp from using Prawn internally, or even distributing the code either as (a) open source, or (b) in any form, if they rename "Prawn" to something else like "Prewn". (In our SaaS-oriented world distribution is less important anyway.)
More than anything the current license is non-standard, which makes it a pain for every user company to legally review, even if the lawyers ultimately find it to be usable. Legal review is much more costly for smaller companies that it is for EvilCorp's infinite army of lawyers. So this is the key driver for going MIT.