If you are asking "can I use Apache License 2.0 in commercial software," the answer is yes, without paying anyone and without open-sourcing your own code, provided you meet a short list of attribution conditions. The same is true for MIT. Both are permissive licenses designed explicitly to allow commercial use, modification, and redistribution. What trips teams up is not permission, it is the conditions: notice files, license text preservation, and a patent clause in Apache 2.0 that can terminate your rights if you litigate.
This post walks through what each license actually obligates you to do, the differences that matter when choosing between them, and the compliance mistakes we see most often in real dependency trees.
Apache 2.0 License Summary
A practical apache 2.0 license summary in five points:
- You may use, reproduce, modify, distribute, and sublicense the work, commercially or not, in source or binary form.
- You must include a copy of the license with any distribution.
- You must preserve copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices, and if the project ships a
NOTICEfile, you must include its attributions in your distribution. - You must state significant changes you made to modified files.
- You get an express patent license from every contributor covering their contributions, and that patent license terminates for anyone who files patent litigation alleging the work infringes.
There is no requirement to publish your own source code, no royalty, and no restriction on the price you charge. Android, Kubernetes, and most of the Apache Software Foundation ecosystem ship under this license inside countless commercial products.
What MIT Requires
Can MIT license be used commercially? Yes, and its obligations fit in one sentence: include the copyright notice and the license text in all copies or substantial portions of the software. That is the entire compliance burden. There is no NOTICE file mechanism, no change-documentation requirement, and no express patent language.
The brevity is the point. MIT is roughly 170 words, which is why it remains the most used license on GitHub. For a consumer of MIT code, compliance usually means an attributions file, an about screen, or a bundled THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES document listing each package, its copyright line, and the license text.
Apache-2.0 License vs MIT: The Differences That Matter
For commercial use, the apache-2.0 license vs mit decision comes down to four differences:
| Aspect | Apache 2.0 | MIT |
|---|---|---|
| Patent grant | Express, with litigation termination | None stated |
| NOTICE file | Must be propagated if present | Not applicable |
| State changes | Required for modified files | Not required |
| GPLv2 compatibility | Incompatible (per FSF) | Compatible |
The patent grant is the big one. With Apache 2.0, every contributor grants you a license to any of their patents that read on their contribution. With MIT, you are relying on an implied license theory that has never been cleanly tested. For companies operating in patent-dense domains, that difference is why legal teams often prefer consuming Apache 2.0 code and releasing under it.
The GPL compatibility difference points the other way: MIT code can be combined into GPLv2 projects, while the Free Software Foundation considers Apache 2.0 incompatible with GPLv2 (though compatible with GPLv3). If your product ecosystem touches GPLv2 components, this matters.
What You Do Not Have to Do
Worth stating plainly, because these myths persist in code review threads:
- You do not have to open-source your application because it depends on Apache 2.0 or MIT libraries.
- You do not have to publish your modifications to the library, even substantial ones (though upstreaming is usually smart engineering).
- You do not need permission from or payment to the authors.
- You do not have to use the same license for your own code.
The reciprocity obligations people fear belong to copyleft licenses like GPL and AGPL, a completely different category we cover in our map of software license agreement types.
Where Teams Actually Fail Compliance
Having reviewed a lot of dependency trees, the failures are boringly consistent:
Missing attributions entirely. The product ships hundreds of MIT and Apache dependencies and no third-party notices at all. This is the default state of most startups and it is technically a license violation for every one of those packages.
Dropping the NOTICE file. Teams copy the Apache 2.0 license text but never check whether upstream ships a NOTICE file. If it does, its contents must travel with your distribution.
Trademark confusion. Apache 2.0 explicitly does not grant trademark rights. Using a project's logo or name to market your product needs separate permission.
Vendored code with stripped headers. An engineer copies a source file into the repo and deletes the license header "for cleanliness." That header is the copyright notice you are obligated to preserve.
License drift in transitive dependencies. Your direct dependency is MIT, but three levels down something is AGPL. Nobody looks. Automated scanning is the only realistic control here; an SCA platform such as Safeguard resolves the full transitive tree and evaluates each component's license against policy on every build.
Generating Attributions Without Pain
The mechanics are simple to automate. Most ecosystems have tooling: license-checker or licensee for npm, pip-licenses for Python, go-licenses for Go, and the license data embedded in SBOM formats like CycloneDX and SPDX. A reasonable pipeline generates an SBOM at build time, extracts per-component license and copyright data, renders a notices file, and fails the build if a component's license is unknown or outside policy.
Unknown is the operative word. A surprising fraction of packages declare no license or a nonstandard one, and "no license" legally means all rights reserved, which is worse for you than GPL. Treat unlicensed dependencies as blockers, not noise.
FAQ
Can I use Apache License 2.0 in commercial closed-source products?
Yes. Apache 2.0 permits commercial use, modification, and distribution in closed-source products. You must include the license text, preserve notices, propagate any NOTICE file, and state significant changes to modified files. You never have to release your own source code.
Can MIT license be used commercially without attribution?
No. Commercial use is fully allowed, but the one condition MIT imposes is preserving the copyright notice and license text in copies or substantial portions. Ship a third-party notices file and you are compliant.
Can I sell software that uses Apache 2.0 or MIT libraries?
Yes, at any price. Neither license restricts commercial sale or requires royalties. Your customers receive the libraries under their original licenses, so your distribution must carry the required notices.
Which is safer for a company: Apache 2.0 or MIT?
For consuming code, both are low-risk. Apache 2.0 offers stronger legal footing because of its express patent grant, which is why it is often preferred for infrastructure components in patent-sensitive industries. MIT wins on simplicity and GPLv2 compatibility.