Clarify the Rust compiler's licensing status

[pietroalbini]

There is some uncertainty in the Rust compiler's licensing status, and we should work to address that.

Work has been started to create licensing guidelines for contributors, and a WG has been created to handle the issue. Their first meeting was on June 12th (minutes).

Item added by before we transitioned to this issue tracker for our agenda.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue is an item on the Core Team's public agenda, and the team will discuss it every week during the triage meeting. The goal of the issue is to provide a public record of our discussion, so only members of the Core Team are allowed to comment here.

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[nikomatsakis]

Update: as @skade wasn't present today, no update.

[pietroalbini]

There was no update this week.

[steveklabnik]

No update this week, moving to occasional checkin

[steveklabnik]

No update this week

[Mark-Simulacrum]

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/73530 is waiting for the core team (or whoever) to review the licensing implications therein.

[steveklabnik]

No updates this week.

[steveklabnik]

no updates

[steveklabnik]

no updates

[skade]

I'd like to disown this. I would really like to work on this and it is an important topic, but my bandwidth is lacking. Above that, this blocks Josh and Felix. Happy to provide a structured handover.

[Manishearth]

@Mark-Simulacrum recognized this can be done by non-core, and might try to find someone to work on this or work on it himself

[Mark-Simulacrum]

I have pinged Josh Triplett and Felix on this:

Hey, wanted to reach out about the licensing work -- Florian isn't able to find time to work on that, but my impression is that there is no need to block on him either for the initial non-lawyer requiring phase, at least.

I am happy to be core team liaison for you though I do not have the bandwidth to participate actively. Let me know if you think it's feasible to get something going here, or if you think we need to find other folks. I think last I recall, the high level initial goals were to:

• Figure out what licenses are currently in use, along with what we communicate to the world (e.g. in artifacts).
  • It seems likely that things are at least out of date here if still acceptable. I imagine that we can likely update our public documentation ourselves.
• Document what needs to be checked for new dependencies for both std and rustc (and/or who to ping to confirm).

I suspect that for the first item if there are discrepancies between the various licenses, we'll eventually want to loop in some legal support if we're not confident that things are compatible as-is, but that can be left until it's somewhat easier for us to do so (i.e., post foundation).

I will keep track of that and report back on progress; I'm going to mark this issue as paused in the mean time, it does not need sync discussion.