CONTRIBUTING: Add licensing details (#1994) #2493
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Great! I have one more question (maybe for @sylvestre): should we allow Apache 2.0 only dependencies?
CONTRIBUTING.md
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| @@ -25,6 +25,9 @@ search the issues to make sure no one else is working on it. | |||
| 1. Don't hesitate to move common functions into uucore if they can be reused by other binaries. | |||
| 1. Unsafe code should be documented with Safety comments. | |||
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| uutils is original code. It cannot contain code from existing GNU or Unix-like | |||
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Could you add this to the list instead of a separate paragraph?
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great indeed! thanks for paying attention to licenses! |
This question has been asked in issue #2086. I don't know what the consensus is, it may even be a nuanced answer based on the dependency rather than a straight out yes or no. (See for example, the licensing policy of FreeBSD: they use BSD/ISC/MIT licensing but their core team allows Apache on a case-by-case basis.) |
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Issue #2086 was indeed why I brought it up. The main difference with MIT seems to be that you have to state the changes you make, so I'm leaning towards allowing it for dependencies, but not allowing copying code from Apache 2.0 projects. This ensures that we don't modify the code without stating the changes. Does that make sense? |
That makes sense to me. We could add a third license category, between "acceptable" and "licenses we will not use".
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Sounds good, but I'd like to hear what @sylvestre and @rivy think before we commit to that. |
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Sounds great! thanks :) |
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Thank you @sylvestre and @tertsdiepraam . @rivy , do you have any opinions please. Should we add a third license category to
Thanks. |
Add a note the licensing section, stating that references using the Apache License are acceptable on a case-by-case basis when there is no MIT-licensed alternative. * Follow-up to uutils#1994 / uutils#2493 * Intended to resolve issue uutils#2086
Document existing practices around licensing, including making it clear
not to copy/reference GPL code.
Intended to resolve #1994.