Skip to content

ADR-0016: MIT license

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-09-28 Deciders: Alex Nodeland

Context

artifactr is a library meant to be depended on and extended by other projects, including commercial ones. Its dependencies (Pydantic, pydantic-ai, SQLAlchemy, FastAPI, the MCP SDK) are all under permissive licenses. The maintainer's other libraries use MIT.

Decision

artifactr is licensed under the MIT License. The license text is in LICENSE and declared in pyproject.toml with SPDX metadata (license = "MIT"). Contributions are accepted under the same license.

Options considered

Option Adoption friction Patent grant Copyleft
MIT (chosen) Lowest No No
Apache-2.0 Low Yes No
MPL-2.0 Medium Yes File-level
GPL or AGPL High for libraries Yes Strong

Trade-off analysis

MIT matches the dependency ecosystem and the maintainer's other projects, and imposes nothing on applications built with the library. Apache-2.0's explicit patent grant is its main advantage; for a small library with no patent exposure that advantage is modest, and it can be revisited if contributors or users need it.

Consequences

  • Easier: adoption by any project, including commercial ones.
  • Harder: nothing prevents proprietary forks. That is acceptable for a library whose value grows with adoption.
  • Revisit if an explicit patent grant becomes important to contributors.

Action items

  1. Add LICENSE and SPDX metadata.
  2. State the contribution licensing in CONTRIBUTING.md.