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Replace HIDAPI license text with "original" license. #9786

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icculus opened this issue May 13, 2024 · 1 comment
Closed

Replace HIDAPI license text with "original" license. #9786

icculus opened this issue May 13, 2024 · 1 comment
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@icculus
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icculus commented May 13, 2024

According to hidapi's repo, the license options are:

HIDAPI can be used under one of three licenses.

  1. The GNU General Public License, version 3.0, in LICENSE-gpl3.txt
  2. A BSD-Style License, in LICENSE-bsd.txt.
  3. The more liberal original HIDAPI license. LICENSE-orig.txt

The license chosen is at the discretion of the user of HIDAPI. For example:

  1. An author of GPL software would likely use HIDAPI under the terms of the
    GPL.

  2. An author of commercial closed-source software would likely use HIDAPI
    under the terms of the BSD-style license or the original HIDAPI license.

The "original license" is:

HIDAPI - Multi-Platform library for
communication with HID devices.

Copyright 2009, Alan Ott, Signal 11 Software.
All Rights Reserved.

This software may be used by anyone for any reason so
long as the copyright notice in the source files
remains intact.

This is simpler than the BSD license, requiring less from users of the code, so we should replace this at the top of SDL_hidapi.h, but it's also completely compatible with the zlib license, as it's only requirement is the same as zlib's third point ("This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution."), which means no one would have to build with SDL_HIDAPI_DISABLED for licensing requirements.

@icculus icculus added this to the 3.2.0 milestone May 13, 2024
@icculus
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icculus commented May 13, 2024

(Putting this in 3.2.0, but we should do this to SDL2, also.)

@icculus icculus modified the milestones: 3.2.0, 3.0 ABI May 18, 2024
icculus added a commit that referenced this issue May 20, 2024
HIDAPI's source code licensing says this:

```
HIDAPI can be used under one of three licenses.

1. The GNU General Public License, version 3.0, in LICENSE-gpl3.txt
2. A BSD-Style License, in LICENSE-bsd.txt.
3. The more liberal original HIDAPI license. LICENSE-orig.txt

The license chosen is at the discretion of the user of HIDAPI. For example:
1. An author of GPL software would likely use HIDAPI under the terms of the
GPL.

2. An author of commercial closed-source software would likely use HIDAPI
under the terms of the BSD-style license or the original HIDAPI license.
```

Since the original license in LICENSE-orig.txt is basically only clause 3 of
the zlib license (do not remove this notice from the source code), it makes
sense to switch to it, since it adds no new requirements to the user.

(Plus, it's extremely short and direct, which is always nice.)

The entire license:

```
 HIDAPI - Multi-Platform library for
 communication with HID devices.

 Copyright 2009, Alan Ott, Signal 11 Software.
 All Rights Reserved.

 This software may be used by anyone for any reason so
 long as the copyright notice in the source files
 remains intact.
```

Fixes #9786.

(cherry picked from commit dd09d4b)
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