Please clarify the license

[musicinmybrain]

In the Cargo.toml files, the license is said to be MIT AND BSD-3-Clause:

isal-rs/Cargo.toml

Line 7 in 688e09f

license = "MIT AND BSD-3-Clause"

isal-rs/isal-sys/Cargo.toml

Line 6 in 688e09f

license = "MIT AND BSD-3-Clause"

However, both the top-level LICENSE file for the crates and the isal-sys/isa-l/LICENSE in the submodule for the bundled ISA-L library are BSD-3-Clause.

The only mention of MIT is in test-data/COPYING, which says that kppkn.gtb is MIT-licensed – but these test data files are no longer included in the published crates since #27; they were never included in isal-sys; and MIT is not the only license present in the test files, so it seems unlikely that this explains its presence in the overall license expression.

If this is really just BSD-3-Clause, could you please adjust the license metadata? And if some part is really MIT, could you please clarify which part that is, and provide the applicable MIT license text (copyright and permission statements)?

[milesgranger]

Hi there!

Please forgive any ignorance with licensing.
I'm partial to MIT and quite frankly Unlicense for my open-source work, but I understand to some extent the impediments of Unlicense so generally side with MIT. In my mind, I added both, BSD because that's what ISA-L has, and MIT because that's what the work/implementation of these bindings represent and MIT was compatible in this sense. I'm very open to being educated here though. :)

[musicinmybrain]

Ok, so if I understand you correctly, you intended the bindings to be MIT, and the bundled isa-l library is the only part that is BSD-3-Clause.

Then MIT AND BSD-3-Clause, which means “you must comply with both the terms of the MIT license and the terms of the BSD-3-Clause license,” appears be correct for isal-sys – although a specific comment explaining the breakdown of which parts are under which licenses would be nice. In Fedora, since we would patch a rust-isal-sys package to always use the system shared library, and we wouldn’t include the bundled isa-l, such a comment would justify changing the license expression to merely MIT.

For isal-rs, since only your binding code is included in the crate, this would suggest that the license could be merely MIT.

In any case, if the bindings are supposed to be MIT-licensed, then there should be a corresponding original license text present so that people can comply with the requirement to include copyright and permission statements (license text) in copies or substantial portions. Currently, the top-level LICENSE has BSD-3-Clause text, but your comments above seem to suggest it should have MIT text instead – like the one in blosc2-rs, but presumably with a copyright date of 2022 to match the existing license file.

Am I making any sense? Happy to rephrase or clarify, or to learn that I’ve misunderstood something.

[milesgranger]

Oh boy, honestly whatever is easiest for users is okay with me. I did mean "and" in the sense that either are fine, anyway it seems to me that just going with BSD-3-Clause is the correct option here? I don't want to infringe on any license w/ this work, but I also want to give end users of it the most flexibility possible is all.

[musicinmybrain]

Sure, you could just change all of the license metadata in the Cargo.toml files to BSD-3-Clause, which matches the existing license file and the bundled isa-l. That’s probably the simplest thing to do, if MIT was only supposed to apply to your own work and you don’t really care much either way.

(There’s nothing wrong with your own work being under a different license than the wrapped library, as long as it’s clear what is what, and everything has the necessary license text somewhere.)

[musicinmybrain]

I did mean "and" in the sense that either are fine …

For future reference, that’s expressed as OR in SPDX – see D.4.2 and D.4.3 for precise definitions.

[milesgranger]

Thanks for the help clarifying things for me here. I've been in very few situations where I personally cared much at all about the license, only want my work to be easily accessible for users w/o conflicting w/ another's licensing. So if BSD-3-Clause across the board is best suited to accomplish that for this project then it's good for me. 👍