Relicense under dual MIT/Apache-2.0

[kvark]

See gfx-rs/gfx#847
cc @Lokathor

[Lokathor]

Uh, I guess I missed this email for a while.

Anyway, if you're going to do this re-license thing anyway, I would strongly suggest Apache-2.0 / Zlib instead of using MIT. From an open source perspective, Zlib is strictly easier for end users than MIT.

[Skepfyr]

Really?.... 😢
Looking at this I reckon it will be substantially easier than gfx was, due to it being newer and having fewer contributors.
Interestingly, I would advise against the Zlib licence. It will be harder to use for a lot of people, entirely due to the fact that it's much less common. Companies wanting to use wgpu will probably have policies in place for using the MIT licence but not the Zlib license. The only alternative would be BSD but they are so similar to MIT that the benefits of ecosystem unity outweigh any licence benefits.

[Lokathor]

It is the license used by zlib, libpng, and SDL2, so your game dev shop probably already is familiar with it.

Google allows Zlib, it took less than an hour to get it approved and added to their accepted license lib.

Zlib is very clearly superior to MIT from a perspective of keeping license text bloat under control in our ecosystem as we try to start developing and shipping binaries to people in the coming years.

[Lokathor]

Or MIT / Apache / Zlib tri-license would be fine.

[Skepfyr]

I'm assuming by "keeping license text bloat under control" you are referring to this part of the license?

If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.

[Lokathor]

Yes, a zlib binary does not have to carry the license text for zlib dependencies.

Given the average dependency count of rust stuff (50-150, sometimes as high as 400), this is actually burdensome.

[kvark]

@Lokathor do you know how to summon this bot that would invite people to comment? We want it on both wgpu and wgpu-rs repos.

[Lokathor]

I don't know of any special github bots.

[kvark]

@cmr how do we get a bot to generate an issue like gfx-rs/gfx#847 ?

[Imberflur]

@kvark I found this repo which may be the source of the script https://github.com/emberian/relicense-assistant

[Imberflur]

I adapted the script a bit to generate the text for an issue: issue.txt

#!/usr/bin/env python3
from github import Github
import os

g = Github(os.getenv("GH_API_TOKEN"))
tpl = open("issue-template.txt").read()
issue = open("issue.txt", "w")

repo = "gfx-rs/wgpu"
project_name = "wgpu"

try:
    r = g.get_repo(repo)
    contribs = "\n".join(sorted(map(lambda u: " - [ ] @{}".format(u.login), r.get_contributors())))
    issue_body = tpl.replace("{{project_name}}", project_name) + "\n" + contribs

    issue.write("Relicense under dual MIT/Apache-2.0\n\n")
    issue.write(issue_body)
except Exception as e:
    print("Some exception in {}".format(repo))
    print(e)

[kvark]

@Imberflur could you... run it?

[Imberflur]

@Imberflur could you... run it?

I linked the generated text, do you want me to create an issue? I figured it could be created manually and might need some tweaking for flavor.

[kvark]

Thank you!
Closing in favor of #1473

[kvark]

Strange that a part of the list is in bold

[Skepfyr]

I vaguely remember that's because GitHub has a maximum number of people you can ping in a single message, everyone not in bold didn't get pinged so are unlikely to notice the post.