Changes

The choice of a suitable license is of paramount importance for any FL framework. A well-crafted license provides a legal foundation that governs the usage, distribution, and modification of the framework’s source code and associated components. A permissive license, like the MIT License or Apache License, allows users to use, modify, and distribute the framework with relatively few restrictions. This encourages widespread adoption, fosters innovation, and facilitates contributions from a broader community of developers and researchers. The permissiveness of these licenses empowers users to incorporate the framework into their projects, even if hey have proprietary components. On the other hand, copyleft licenses, like the GNU GPL, require derived works to be distributed under the same terms, ensuring that any modifications or extensions to the framework remain open-source. While this may be more restrictive, it encourages a collaborative ecosystem where improvements are shared back with the community. A clear and well-defined license also provides legal protection to both developers and users, helping to mitigate potential legal risks and disputes. It ensures that contributors have granted appropriate rights to their work and helps maintain a healthy and sustainable development environment. Most of the frameworks previously described are under the Apache-2.0 license except one: IBMFL. In fact, it is under an unspecified license that makes the framework not suitable for commercial use. For that reason, IBMFL was discarded from the comparison too.