Open Source license for ETL

[rolandreichweinbmw]

Hi! As John mentioned in #1058 , he considered changing ETL's license to non-Open Source. Thank you for not enforcing this idea right now! The fact that ETL is released under a permissive Open Source license (MIT) is one of the main reasons why ETL is adopted by so many industry and hobbyist projects. And especially because of the MIT license, ETL made such a big impact in Open Source. It is even part of Debian and Ubuntu! https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/etlcpp

Regarding Embedded Template Libraries on the proprietary market: this is actually where I moved away from and chose ETL instead.

On the other hand, it is unfortunate that you intentionally held back some new feature PRs.

Please be aware that out of necessity, people need to maintain forks of ETL with their additional features, as I'm doing at https://github.com/rolandreichweinbmw/etlplus for those open PRs:

• Support chrono.h #1048
• Support etl::inplace_function #1046
• Added iterator and const_iterator to etl::ipool #1043
• Various cleanup changes #1049
• Alignment typed storage #1023
• Support etl::underlying_type with compiler builtin #1045

I'd rather like to see them in mainline ETL instead of in a "missing features fork".

[jwellbelove]

I have been moving back to the idea of keeping everything MIT, because of the reasons you mentioned.
Making the whole library dual licence would require getting a copyright release from every contributor over the last ten years, and adding 'dual licence only' new features may cause people to stay on their own forks of the last totally free ETL version. The ETL could then fragment into many proprietary versions.