Relicense under dual MIT/Apache-2.0

Question

Relicense under dual MIT/Apache-2.0

emberian opened this issue 9 years ago · 107 comments

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, due to not being a "creative
work", e.g. a typo fix) 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, if you have them, use the following boilerplate
(based on that used in Rust):

// Copyright 2016 gfx Developers
//
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, <LICENSE-APACHE or
// http://apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0> or the MIT license <LICENSE-MIT or
// http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>, at your option. This file may not be
// copied, modified, or distributed except according to those terms.

It's commonly asked whether license headers are required. I'm not comfortable
making an official recommendation either way, but the Apache license
recommends it in their appendix on how to use the license.

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 OR 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.

kvark commented 8 years ago

Ping:

kvark commented 7 years ago

Ping

Answer 1 · 2016-01-10T19:16:26.000Z

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

Answer 2 · 2016-01-10T20:05:24.000Z

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

Answer 3 · 2016-01-10T20:06:13.000Z

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

Answer 4 · 2016-01-10T20:14:37.000Z

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

Answer 5 · 2016-01-10T22:10:11.000Z

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

Answer 6 · 2016-01-10T23:25:55.000Z

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

Answer 7 · 2016-01-11T02:19:51.000Z

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

Answer 8 · 2016-01-11T02:35:49.000Z

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

Answer 9 · 2016-01-11T03:13:23.000Z

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

Answer 10 · 2016-01-11T03:24:33.000Z

I license past and future contributions under the dual MIT/Apache-2.0
license, allowing licensees to chose either at their option.
On 11 Jan 2016 16:13, "red75prime" notifications@github.com wrote:

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

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#847 (comment).

Answer 11 · 2016-01-11T04:33:52.000Z

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

Answer 12 · 2016-01-11T04:37:32.000Z

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

Answer 13 · 2016-01-11T05:17:48.000Z

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

Answer 14 · 2016-01-11T06:23:20.000Z

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

Answer 15 · 2016-01-11T08:09:37.000Z

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

Answer 16 · 2016-01-11T08:14:13.000Z

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

Answer 17 · 2016-01-11T09:02:13.000Z

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

Answer 18 · 2016-01-11T10:20:38.000Z

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

Answer 19 · 2016-01-11T12:14:05.000Z

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

Answer 20 · 2016-01-11T12:47:56.000Z

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

Answer 21 · 2016-01-11T16:31:34.000Z

I approve the relicensing of my contributions.

Answer 22 · 2016-01-11T20:00:27.000Z

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

Answer 23 · 2016-01-11T20:02:42.000Z

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

Answer 24 · 2016-01-11T20:04:16.000Z

Pinging due to @-mention limit:

@jahfer
@leonkunert
@mzmonsour
@ReadmeCritic
@AnthIste
@sbward
@alexcrichton
@tomjakubowski
@yuriks
@gaudecker
@ahtn
@qres
@tioover

Answer 25 · 2016-01-11T20:07:03.000Z

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

Answer 26 · 2016-01-11T20:08:08.000Z

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

Answer 27 · 2016-01-11T21:21:05.000Z

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

Answer 28 · 2016-01-11T21:41:17.000Z

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

Answer 29 · 2016-01-12T00:09:55.000Z

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

Answer 30 · 2016-01-12T07:13:18.000Z

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

Answer 31 · 2016-01-12T07:33:36.000Z

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

Answer 32 · 2016-01-12T15:20:20.000Z

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

Answer 33 · 2016-01-12T17:40:36.000Z

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

Answer 34 · 2016-01-13T04:00:17.000Z

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

Answer 35 · 2016-01-24T12:13:16.000Z

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

Answer 36 · 2016-01-24T13:14:11.000Z

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

Answer 37 · 2016-01-24T16:24:00.000Z

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

Answer 38 · 2016-01-25T10:37:02.000Z

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

Answer 39 · 2016-05-23T00:37:10.000Z

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

Answer 40 · 2016-05-24T14:25:37.000Z

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

Answer 41 · 2016-08-28T09:18:13.000Z

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

Answer 42 · 2016-08-31T20:37:30.000Z

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

Answer 43 · 2016-08-31T20:38:24.000Z

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

Answer 44 · 2016-08-31T20:58:44.000Z

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

Answer 45 · 2016-09-03T16:18:29.000Z

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

Answer 46 · 2016-09-03T18:40:29.000Z

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

Answer 47 · 2017-06-19T15:48:44.000Z

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

Answer 48 · 2017-06-20T19:49:38.000Z

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

Answer 49 · 2017-06-27T16:04:01.000Z

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

Answer 50 · 2018-01-25T17:39:56.000Z

Is it still realistical that gfx can move to the dual licensing scheme? I'm seeing 130 contributors to the repo right now, and only 63 people listed in this issue. Also, any new contributor would have to sign this off. I think if you want to pull this through, you should put a note into the README that any future contributions will have to be dual licensed.

Answer 51 · 2018-01-26T14:30:14.000Z

Unfortunately, IANAL. @est31 do you think it is possible for us to announce that we are transitioning to a new license, and every contributor has, let's say 10 days, to express their objections?

Answer 52 · 2018-01-26T20:50:36.000Z

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

Answer 53 · 2018-01-26T22:42:41.000Z

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

Answer 54 · 2018-01-26T23:13:53.000Z

@kvark IANAL either so I can't say anything definite, but I don't think that not giving an answer qualifies as consent in this case. What you can do however is to remove components written by people who didn't agree or who you couldn't reach and get them replaced or rewritten.

As gfx keeps getting more successful (a very good thing!) this licensing move keeps getting harder and harder.

A good plan for a grown project like this is to:

add a note that new contributions are under the new dual licensing scheme. I've added one such note to the Rust rfcs repo.
get the consent of all authors of currently open PRs. Only has to be once as they could otherwise claim to not know about this (it is an edge case).
get a comprehensive list of all contributors to the codebase, I think the one in this thread is outdated
try to get consent from all of them, track that consent. For the Rust rfcs repo I'm archiving the issue on archive.org as github accounts may be deleted or comments edited etc.
After a while you've probably got to put an end to the previous process, e.g. if you want to release a 1.0 one day. From some people you won't get consent, most likely due to them being unreachable.
Remove any contributions relevant to copyright by people who didn't give their consent (including those you couldn't reach). Whether a contribution is relevant to copyright or not is a tough question, I can't give a definite answer to it myself :). But generally if it is trivial it doesn't have copyright while if it is a bigger change it should have copyright.

There will most likely be a long tail, people going to vacation, some completely leaving github, etc etc.

Answer 55 · 2018-01-27T02:53:33.000Z

@est31 thank you, this is very helpful!
I updated the README by adopting the pieces from the one you linked.

One thing is not clear to me. If we can remove/rewrite any contributions of authors who don't give their consent, can we then only be concerned about authors who have at least a single line of the actual master branch (as opposed to all the contributors)? This is super important because the code base has mostly been rewritten, and we don't have nearly as many contributions left as the statistics may imply.

I'd also wonder if you know the tools at hand that would gather us the list of authors having at least a single line of code.

Answer 56 · 2018-01-27T04:40:08.000Z

Running the (adopted) bash command from stackoverflow

on 4dfa4f1 gives me 68 lines, so a considerably smaller list of people. Exchanging author with author-mail gives e-mail addresses. This blame based approach isn't perfect of course, some authors may slip through the cracks. E.g. someone contributes, and someone else then runs rustfmt. In blame, only the rustfmt change will show up. In the end all things are approximations of the perfect. I don't know of anything better (other than manually checking whether someone's contributions have really all disappeared already which is quite a large task). Your choice :).

Finding out github usernames is a bit tough, as github's api doesn't have a function that for a given email gives you an username. However there is a trick that I've done by searching for commits by those authors instead, and the github account is part of the json response of the github API see this post for more (you'll probably have to obtain an api token and send it along your requests). That particular command has obtained everyone who ever contributed which is different though.

Answer 57 · 2018-03-19T16:33:41.000Z

Obligatory IANAL, due to the fact I've made a few judgment calls as to whether something is copyrightable. I've sat down and gone through the list of every committer and these are the people left as far as I have worked out. I have a spreadsheet with more information, however, I won't share it here as it contains some reasonably private information.

I also have most peoples email addresses if it ever needs to be stepped up a notch but I am currently unsure of the best way to go about doing that.

Answer 58 · 2018-03-19T16:34:30.000Z

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

Answer 59 · 2018-03-19T16:35:26.000Z

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

Answer 60 · 2018-03-19T16:41:34.000Z

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

Answer 61 · 2018-03-19T17:11:42.000Z

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

Answer 62 · 2018-03-19T17:13:23.000Z

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

Answer 63 · 2018-03-19T17:13:40.000Z

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

Answer 64 · 2018-03-19T17:22:19.000Z

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

Answer 65 · 2018-03-19T17:24:47.000Z

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

Answer 66 · 2018-03-19T17:33:30.000Z

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

Answer 67 · 2018-03-19T17:36:06.000Z

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

Answer 68 · 2018-03-19T17:36:25.000Z

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

Answer 69 · 2018-03-19T17:40:44.000Z

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

Answer 70 · 2018-03-19T17:40:47.000Z

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

Answer 71 · 2018-03-19T17:44:48.000Z

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

Answer 72 · 2018-03-19T17:47:22.000Z

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

Answer 73 · 2018-03-19T17:49:19.000Z

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

Answer 74 · 2018-03-19T17:52:19.000Z

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

Answer 75 · 2018-03-19T17:55:38.000Z

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

Answer 76 · 2018-03-19T18:21:04.000Z

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

Answer 77 · 2018-03-19T18:26:12.000Z

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

Answer 78 · 2018-03-19T18:37:02.000Z

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

Answer 79 · 2018-03-19T19:08:56.000Z

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

Answer 80 · 2018-03-19T19:36:18.000Z

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

Answer 81 · 2018-03-19T20:25:22.000Z

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

Answer 82 · 2018-03-19T21:51:40.000Z

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

Answer 83 · 2018-03-19T23:23:31.000Z

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

Answer 84 · 2018-03-20T01:29:28.000Z

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

Answer 85 · 2018-03-20T04:47:27.000Z

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

Answer 86 · 2018-03-20T07:12:55.000Z

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

Answer 87 · 2018-03-20T10:28:10.000Z

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

Answer 88 · 2018-03-20T11:42:39.000Z

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

Answer 89 · 2018-03-20T11:56:58.000Z

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

Answer 90 · 2018-03-20T13:31:47.000Z

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

…

Answer 91 · 2018-03-21T06:59:19.000Z

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

Answer 92 · 2018-03-22T05:41:17.000Z

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

Answer 93 · 2018-04-10T13:47:29.000Z

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

Answer 94 · 2018-04-10T14:04:03.000Z

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

Answer 95 · 2018-04-10T14:32:59.000Z

Wow somebody mailed me....

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

Answer 96 · 2018-04-10T15:53:45.000Z

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

Answer 97 · 2018-04-10T15:57:29.000Z

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

Answer 98 · 2018-04-10T16:42:16.000Z

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