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The project maintainer explicitly agreed to have this issue opened.

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.


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. Stronger protections to licensees and better interoperation with the wider Rust ecosystem is.


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. The advice the FSF uses is "less than 15 lines") and then add the following to your README:

## License

Licensed under either of


at your option.

### Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally
or conditions.

and in your license headers, if you have them, use the following boilerplate (based on that used in Rust):

// Copyright 2016 {{project_name}} Developers
// Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0, <LICENSE-APACHE or
//> or the MIT license <LICENSE-MIT or
//>, 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.

You can’t perform that action at this time.