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Review the repository's current Public Domain license statement and the discussion on this issue, including the linked Spring Boot comment. Determine whether the project has settled on a recognised license and which one is acceptable to the maintainers; done means the repository's licensing information reflects that decision.

Hi,

This project is used by many because it is a great implementation.

What I found is that in many places people are jumping through strange hoops because the license of this project historically had a "no evil" clause.

A few years ago this was changed to "Public Domain" which as a first impression sounds good.

However I found that some really relevant projects (like Spring) are not changing from the previous created hoops because they state (Quote) This is not a recognised open source licence.

See https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/41201#issuecomment-2182887829

While the licence was changed in 2022, it now simply states that it is "Public Domain". This is not a recognised open source licence so, unfortunately, we and many other projects in the Java ecosystem do not feel that they can safely depend upon it.

So my request is simple: Please attach an existing / known open license that matches how you see things.

I had a look at

• This list https://opensource.org/licenses?categories=international%2Cpopular-strong-community
• What Apache projects can use https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html

From my standpoint something that is in the "Category A" list for the ASF would be great.

So something like the Apache Licence 2.0, one of the BSD or MIT variants mentioned on the Apache site would make things a lot better.

Looking at the projects I know and use; my preference would be the Apache Licence 2.0.
(Which is what I use for all of the projects I open sourced).

Thanks for making this project!

Niels Basjes