Arm's ASTC Encoder Replaces Its Restrictive EULA With Apache 2.0 License

Arm has been developing the ASTC encoder as the texture compressor for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) as open-source but until last week was carrying a restrictive license.

The Arm ASTC encoder had been carrying an end-user license agreement that is rather restrictive to not only the code but also the documentation and Mali ASTC specification. The EULA has been quite restrictive and far from conventional open-source licenses.

The good news last week is that Arm moved the project to an Apache 2.0 license. The old EULA can be found via this Git commit.

This should clear up the legal uncertainties around this open-source texture compressor and make it much easier to adopt for projects complying with the Apache license rather than the Arm EULA. The ASTC encoder is available from GitHub.

Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression is the lossy texture compression algorithm co-engineered by Arm and AMD that is an extension to OpenGL and OpenGL ES.