You are of course free to release your software under any license you want, and
I really don't want to hijack this thread, but your summation of the Apache
License is not accurate.
Your summation ("it is as free as you can get, with the only requirement that
if you actually do modifications to the library itself, you have to give credit
to the original authors") actually describes the licenses that I encourage the
Nim community to stick to, like MIT.
AL2's [three pages of
legalese](http://copyfree.org/content/standard/rejected/apache2/license.txt)
contain other restrictions and side-effects, and mixing them into an
MIT-licensed software ecosystem creates
[complications](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4m18kb/stop_putting_your_project_out_under_public_domain/d3rx4gz/).
As some other copyfree advocates had put it:
* "I prefer to avoid contributing to projects where a momentary lapse or
scripting bug could expose me to the risks of litigation, and to avoid
incorporating anything into my own projects that would require other people to
shoulder those risks (and the burden of using commit hook scripts to help
insulate them against legal risk)."
[*](https://forums.sifive.com/t/the-apache-license-is-long-and-needlessly-complex/311)
* "The Apache license has cumbersome requirements such as the requirement to
'cause any modified files to carry prominent notices stating that You changed
the files'."
* "I hate software licenses. When I read a software license, what I see is a
bunch of officious, mind-numbing lawyerly doublespeak. Blah, blah, blah.. kill
me now." [*](https://blog.codinghorror.com/pick-a-license-any-license/)
* "The MIT License is pretty short, and pretty simple [...]. The Apache
License has a few more restrictions. Notably, if you change any Apache-licensed
code, you must state so. There are also rules about use of the project name
[...]"
[*](https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-different-between-Apache-v2-0-and-MIT-license)
The current prevalence of [copyfree
licenses](http://copyfree.org/standard/licenses) in Nim's ecosystem (85% of
Nimble is MIT, BSD, ISC, or public domain) makes it the ideal "safer than C"
language for various userland projects. It's a category in which Nim is far
ahead of its competitors, and it's a noteworthy niche for Nim to fill. Those
pure-copyfree projects would have to filter out any [restrictive
licenses](http://copyfree.org/standard/rejected) (including AL2, LGPL, MPL,
OpenSSL, Zlib) and anything that depends on them.
I know it's annoying, but it's easier to make the right licensing decisions
early on than later. Just stick to copyfree licenses, and all this legalese
annoyance goes away.
