Add proper licence

[ismell]

It would be nice to have this GPL2 or BSD licensed. This way it could be included in other projects.

[rfanner]

+1 on having a proper licence.

My feeling is that MIT might be a sensible choice, as that would be consistent with the C++ code by Austin Appleby that was ported to C for this library. (https://sites.google.com/site/murmurhash/).

From the above:

"All code is released to the public domain. For business purposes, Murmurhash is
under the MIT license."

GPL2 would add restrictions beyond "public domain" to make it copyleft, which would potentially impact wider adoption.

[eeliu]

ping

[otac0n]

This issue needn't be open in my opinion. Using it only exposes you to a claimed public-domain port of an MIT licensed library. It is MIT licensed.

[rfanner]

@otac0n agree the exposure is limited.

That said, non-standard or less specific copyright text has a way of cropping up as effort whenever SBOM open source compliance checks need to be done in a commercial context.

Specific license texts like MIT are quick to review/re-review, as tools and people doing FOSS compliance have a common understanding of what these mean.

Non-specific license texts, on the other hand, frequently trigger the need to (repeat) a deeper look at the code and the provenance of the code to establish that commercial (or other) usage is indeed compliant.

It's certainly not a deal-breaker to use "public domain" code, but clearer licensing is always nice to see.

(Provided that license isn't GPLv2, as that would erode previous usage rights on later software versions published in some commercial contexts :) ).