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I’ve noticed a lot of dual-licensed MIT-or-Apache Rust projects have added this clause concerning contributions:

### Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted
for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be
dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Is this necessary, or is it already covered by the Apache license? Does it change the nature of the license at all?

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It does not change the license, but they are alerting you to what you are agreeing to by contributing.

What must be included, under the Apache 2 license, is something similar to this:

Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0

The license does not say where you have to include that, but you must give notice that you are using the Apache 2 license.

They are giving you the right to opt out by saying "unless you explicitly state otherwise".

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  • This might be better to post as a second question, but is the above contribution notice equivalent to this? github.com/berneout/io/blob/e42dd52/IO. This one is actually written by a lawyer.
    – Radish
    Commented Dec 3, 2019 at 20:30
  • I'm not Apache, so I can't say what they approve of or don't but I would suspect they want you to include the URL so people can read the actual license. I think that one you linked to is just meant to be an alert like the one in your question. The actual mention of the license is probably not right there in the code, but may be in the EULA or documentation for the project.
    – Putvi
    Commented Dec 3, 2019 at 20:32
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You are probably referring to the following clause in Apache License, Version 2.0:

  1. Submission of Contributions. Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions. Notwithstanding the above, nothing herein shall supersede or modify the terms of any separate license agreement you may have executed with Licensor regarding such Contributions.

It says nothing about whether a contributor would agree to license its contribution under the MIT license in addition to the Apache License, Version 2.0.

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