hi all,
after consulting with all contributors to the swift-png project, we are pleased to announce that the library is now Apache 2.0 licensed. previously, it was MIT licensed.
1 Like
Just out of curiosity, what motivated the license change?
adopting a more copyleft license can be done at any time by forking the project, but adopting a more copy-right (?) license gets exponentially harder as a package gains more contributors, and we have plans to upstream a lot of work to that repository, so i felt it would be better to push the license reform through now rather than later.
Right, but why was the 'reform' desirable?
Generally I think of MIT and Apache 2.0 (and BSD etc) in the same general family of genuinely open & free, modulo some reasonable attribution requirements.
I know people tend to have their "favourites", which are often just whatever random one they started using first, but it's unusual to see a project shift between licenses within the same family.
(it it were going in or out of GPL, in contrast, it'd be much more apparent what the authors' motivation was)
no matter what license i choose, someone always says that it won’t work for them. if someone does not like Apache 2.0 (unlikely, since Swift itself is Apache 2.0), we can always roll back the reform, but if somebody doesn’t like the MIT license, and the library has gained more than 4 contributors, it will be very difficult to address their concerns.
1 Like