My understanding is that it’s basically the same as MIT with two additions:
The first is a clarification on what you’d probably already assume, that the license applies only to the code, not to trademarks that may appear in it. So if AMD submits a change with the token AMD_BOOT_SETTINGS, that doesn’t grant users of the code the right to pass themselves off as AMD.
The second is a guard against patent trolls, and basically says “If you sue anyone for their use of this code, your rights under this license are revoked.”. This helps prevent a malicious actor from filing a patent, submitting code to a lib that implements the patent, and then suing the other users of that lib for patent infringement.
The net result in my experience is that it doesn’t care to most people, but private industry tends to be more comfortable with Apache2 than MIT. So if you want to increase the odds of more people using and contributing to your lib, use Apache2. If you want to almost guarantee that private industry won’t use it, use GPL.
What’s the difference between the two? I’ve always used MIT because frankly I don’t care who the hell uses my shitty code or where it winds up.
My understanding is that it’s basically the same as MIT with two additions:
The first is a clarification on what you’d probably already assume, that the license applies only to the code, not to trademarks that may appear in it. So if AMD submits a change with the token
AMD_BOOT_SETTINGS, that doesn’t grant users of the code the right to pass themselves off as AMD.The second is a guard against patent trolls, and basically says “If you sue anyone for their use of this code, your rights under this license are revoked.”. This helps prevent a malicious actor from filing a patent, submitting code to a lib that implements the patent, and then suing the other users of that lib for patent infringement.
The net result in my experience is that it doesn’t care to most people, but private industry tends to be more comfortable with Apache2 than MIT. So if you want to increase the odds of more people using and contributing to your lib, use Apache2. If you want to almost guarantee that private industry won’t use it, use GPL.