ADR 0002: License under MIT

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-05-16
• Deciders: @jseifeddine

Context#

PowerDNS-AuthAdmin is intended for community self-hosters and multi-team org IT. The license needs to fit that audience and remove friction for both casual self-hosting and commercial adoption.

Decision#

PowerDNS-AuthAdmin is licensed under the MIT License.

Rationale#

• Maximum permissiveness. Anyone can copy, modify, distribute, or sell. This matches the stated intent of the project's lead.
• Familiarity. MIT is the single most-recognized open-source license; contributors don't have to read it to understand it.
• Compatible with downstream use. Operators integrating PowerDNS-AuthAdmin into their own commercial stacks don't need a legal review before deploying.

Alternatives considered#

• AGPL-3.0. Strongly protects against a closed commercial fork at the cost of accessibility for downstream integrators. Rejected - the goal is broad accessibility, not protection against forking.
• Apache-2.0. Stronger explicit patent grant than MIT. Reasonable alternative; rejected to keep the licensing story as simple as possible. We can upgrade to Apache-2.0 later if the patent grant becomes a felt need.
• BSD-2-Clause / BSD-3-Clause. Effectively MIT with minor differences. MIT is better known.

Consequences#

• Contributions are accepted under MIT (a Developer Certificate of Origin is sufficient; no CLA).
• Anyone can fork PowerDNS-AuthAdmin into a closed commercial product. We accept this trade-off in exchange for accessibility.

References#

• LICENSE