Use of `instant` crate imcompatible w/ MIT license?

Question

Use of `instant` crate imcompatible w/ MIT license?

zeenix opened this issue a year ago · comments

I ran cargo lichking check against zbus and according to that BSD-3-Clause license of instant is incompatible with MIT license of zbus. Seems this is the only crate that brings in this dep. IANAL so can't be sure this is a problem but I wanted to bring this to attention.

@smol-rs/admins ?

John Nunley · Answer 1 · Sun Mar 05 2023 04:29:42 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

IANAL, but if I remember right the main restriction of the BSD 3 clause license over the MIT/Apache2 license is that you can't use the package for advertising. Realistically I don't think this is an issue, since there are plenty of MIT-licensed packages that use instant (winit comes to mind).

John Nunley · Answer 2 · Mon Mar 06 2023 01:17:30 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Seems this is the only crate that brings in this dep.

async-lock also uses the instant crate, as a heads up.

Zeeshan Ali Khan · Answer 3 · Tue Mar 07 2023 02:25:04 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

IANAL, but if I remember right the main restriction of the BSD 3 clause license over the MIT/Apache2 license is that you can't use the package for advertising.

Right and in general when you statically link two libs under different licenses, doesn't the more restrictive license becomes the effective one?

Realistically I don't think this is an issue, since there are plenty of MIT-licensed packages that use instant (winit comes to mind).

True. That does make it unlikely that there is a problem but if there is a problem, I don't think "others are doing it too" argument would hold in a court. :)