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@davesque
davesque committed Nov 27, 2019
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Copyright 2019 David Sanders and the Ethereum Foundation

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies
of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do
so, subject to the following conditions:
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use
this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the
License at

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed
under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR
CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

5 comments on commit 9bca673

@cburgdorf
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@davesque Can you comment on why that was changed to Apache? Is it because of the vyper legacy?

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@cburgdorf Hah...I just noticed this comment now, several months later! It's because, at the time, there was a fair bit of discussion happening in the open source world (and within the snake charmers team) that was calling out the shortcomings of the MIT license with regard to potential patent abuse. I can't remember the specifics of this discussion honestly. But, at the time, the code was still so fresh and no one was really using it. So it seemed like a pretty straight forward matter to re-license.

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@cburgdorf Looks like this stack exchange thread has some of the details: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7964/why-is-the-apache-license-2-0-patent-license-clause-useful-important

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@cburgdorf Sounds like the gist of it is that the Apache 2 license includes a couple terms regarding patents that were useful for Apache projects. That is because Apache projects often have contributors that hold patents on code contributions. Apache wanted to prevent patent abuse by those contributors against users of the open source code. But honestly it's all pretty complicated to me. I went for it because it seemed like a more explicit, comprehensive license that might cover our butts a bit more thoroughly on matters like this and possibly others. For authoritative advice about what to do, I would definitely consult EF legal if you haven't already :).

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Thanks for your answer David. It looks like there went some decent thought into this and also as Sean pointed out in #358 the Apache 2 license is the preferred license in the Rust community (or the dual model with MIT). I'm happy to stick to Apache 1 then.

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