BSD or MIT

[ignatenkobrain]

Hello, Cargo.toml lists BSD OR MIT, however LICENSE file contains only info about BSD... Who is right?

[danielrh]

I suppose the license file is right... I can adjust the Cargo.toml
both licenses are sufficiently permissive that they are quite compatible.

[decathorpe]

Looks like this issue is still unresolved as of today?

[nyurik]

Most Rust projects prefer to use Apache OR MIT approach because MIT is not very compatible with GPL (if my memory is serving me right), and so having two clause approach allows users to use code everywhere more freely.

[decathorpe]

Then the license text for MIT should probably be added to this repo too?

The current license file (https://github.com/dropbox/rust-brotli/blob/master/LICENSE) file only contains the BSD-3-Clause license text, but the MIT license requires that license text is included with redistributed sources.

Usually dual-licensed crates handle this by having two separate license files (i.e. LICENSE-Apache and LICENSE-MIT, in most cases).

MIT is not very compatible with GPL

As far as I know, the problem wrt/ GPL compatibility is actually caused by the Apache-2.0 license, not the MIT license.

[danielrh]

Hmmm should probably copy the license from https://github.com/google/brotli/blob/master/LICENSE

[musicinmybrain]

It would be great to see something happen here. Since the MIT license requires including the copyright and permission notices (the license text) in copies or substantial portions, it’s not possible for people to actually use this software under MIT terms if there’s no original license text available. This makes the crate effectively BSD-3-Clause-only for those who care about license compliance, and it creates a pitfall and an annoyance for people like distribution packagers, who have to patch the license metadata in Cargo.toml to avoid misleading people.

[musicinmybrain]

As a further wrinkle, similarly to dropbox/rust-brotli-decompressor#9 (comment), it turns out that one file is owned by Google and distributed only under MIT terms, so the crate isn’t even properly BSD-3-Clause; it would have to be BSD-3-Clause AND MIT, and the license text for that file needs to be present.

rust-brotli/src/enc/entropy_encode.rs

Lines 1 to 5 in 37d403b

	/* Copyright 2010 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.
	Distributed under MIT license.
	See file LICENSE for detail or copy at https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
	*/

Please do something about this!

[musicinmybrain]

It looks like entropy_encode.rs is based on https://github.com/google/brotli/blob/v1.1.0/c/enc/entropy_encode.c, so (despite the discrepancy in copyright statement between the header and the license file), https://github.com/google/brotli/blob/v1.1.0/LICENSE is probably the appropriate license text here.