Relicense under dual MIT/Apache-2.0

Open emberian opened this issue 8 years ago • 7 comments

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, and 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 in the Rust standard distribution and other project using dual MIT/Apache.

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 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) 2015 t 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.

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