Licensing

[xinzed]

Hi,
Could I potentially convince you to convert the licensing of this Crate/project to a more defined license perhaps MIT? I specifically would like to use it in code I am writing for my job, so I realize asking for the license to be changed so a corporation can use your work for free is probably a bit annoying, but I figured I'd try asking anyways 🙂 .

Thank you so much!

[codyps]

Hi @xinzed,

The license that the code in this repo is currently under should allow for use in a proprietary application because it is https://spdx.org/licenses/LGPL-2.1-or-later.html with https://spdx.org/licenses/GCC-exception-2.0.html. #127 is the issue where we went through adding that (standard) exception for this purpose.

Can you elaborate on the concerns you have here?

[xinzed]

I shared this with our legal team and they have enough context to move on with approval with the license as is. Thank you for responding so quickly!

[xinzed]

Sorry to reopen this issue, but the cstr-argument 0.1.2 crate, which is pulled in as a dependency, is Unlicensed and failing cargo deny check. Our policy is to deny all unlicensed crates, so I'm wondering if you have a suggestion on how to get around that? Thanks!

[A248]

That library is not unlincensed. Rather, it uses the Unlicense, which is a license releasing the work into the public domain (this is not legal advice).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense

Respectfully, you may want to consider looking at the crate licenses your tool flags before deciding the license is incompatible with your proprietary environment. The license tool you employ is not an infallible source of truth. Although the Unlicense truly has an annoying name.

[FedericoCeratto]

May I suggest LGPL-3.0-or-later WITH LGPL-3.0-linking-exception? It's a mouthful but it is a valid SPDX identifier and allows static linking without restrictions.

[codyps]

Hi @xinzed: is the issue here with the "Unlicense" license itself? in other words: you've decided to not use any thing with "Unlicense" license?

I don't consider this a real problem, but if there was another library with similar functionality to cstr-argument (allowing us to abstract over str/cstr in an efficient way), or code to integrate into rust-systemd directly, and someone made a PR to do so, I'd strongly consider merging it.