Skip to content

Relicense from LGPL to MIT #133

@cardmagic

Description

@cardmagic

I'm planning to relicense the classifier gem from LGPL-2.1 to MIT and wanted to get consent from contributors, particularly @dfayram who wrote the original LSI implementation.

Why change to MIT?

  1. Simplicity - MIT is a short, easy-to-understand license. LGPL's terms around linking and distribution can confuse users about what they're allowed to do.

  2. Ruby ecosystem norms - The vast majority of Ruby gems use MIT. LGPL creates unnecessary friction for developers evaluating dependencies.

  3. Commercial adoption - Some companies have blanket policies against LGPL due to its copyleft provisions. MIT removes this barrier.

  4. Current state is confusing - The lib/classifier.rb header already contains MIT license text, but the LICENSE file and gemspec say LGPL. Cleaning this up is overdue.

  5. No practical benefit from LGPL - LGPL's protections made more sense for C libraries. For a Ruby gem that's always distributed as source, the distinction between LGPL and MIT is largely academic.

What I need

If you contributed code to this project and are okay with it being relicensed under MIT, please comment below with your approval. Specifically looking for sign-off from @dfayram for the LSI code.

Thanks!

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions