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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Quoting from an RFD co-authored by bcantrill and myself describing Oxide's policies around open source:

> For any new Oxide-created software, the MPL 2.0 should generally be the license of choice. The exception to this should be any software that is a part of a larger ecosystem that has a prevailing license, in which case that prevailing license may be used.

EDIT: I also am confused about why you are downvoted. Are there any major operating systems distributions that are MPL licensed? I can't think of any off the top of my head. Beyond that it's a simple question.

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I had to look up RFD, and I like the idea!

https://oxide.computer/blog/rfd-1-requests-for-discussion

Ah thanks! Yeah I should have mentioned this in my comment, thank you for adding the context.

By the way, you can browse public RFDs here: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/

I didn't include any links to any RFDs in my comments today because I have only been referencing non-public ones.

> [if Oxide-created software] is a part of a larger ecosystem that has a prevailing license, in which case that prevailing license may be used

How does that work if the prevailing is BSD/MIT/ISC?

You're saying that Oxide can then be licensed under BSD/MIT/ISC?

So I decided to cut off my quote but the next line has the answer:

> For example, Rust crates are generally dual-licensed as MIT/Apache 2.

We often produce components that we share with the broader open source world. For example, dropshot[1] is our in-house web framework, but we publish it as a standalone package. It is licensed under Apache-2.0 instead of MPL 2.0 because the norm in the Rust ecosystem is Apache and not MPL.

> You're saying that Oxide can then be licensed under BSD/MIT/ISC?

I am saying that we do not have one single license across the company. Some components are probably BSD/MIT/ISC licensed somewhere, and I guarantee that some third party dependencies we use are licensed under those licenses. That's different from "you could choose to take it under BSD," which I didn't mean to imply, sorry about that!

1: https://crates.io/crates/dropshot

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