Plans for AutoMapper licensing changes

[aaron-kruse]

Hey Jon, I hope all is well!

AutoMapper recently released a new version 15 upgrade that, among other things, added new licensing requirements. Looking at their website, it looks like there are a few different licensing options available: one is a free Community license (with certain eligibility requirements) and the others are paid licenses.

I know you're kind of in "maintenance mode" with some of your libraries and maybe not looking to take on any new big developmental changes, so I was wondering what plans (if any) you had to address the new licensing requirements since GenericServices is heavily dependent on AutoMapper. I see a few different potential options:

• Do nothing and never upgrade AutoMapper to version 15 or newer (i.e., stay on the last version that didn't have the new licensing requirements).
• Use the free Community license (if eligible).
• Move away from AutoMapper to something else without these licensing requirements (probably beyond the scope of the type of changes you want to make at this point, although maybe there are very similar alternatives available without the licensing requirements).

I'm no licensing expert but from what I understand, you could use the free Community license in your own personal projects (ex. GenericServices) if you are personally eligible to use it (ex. less than $5M USD annual gross revenue), but anyone using your projects that are dependent on AutoMapper would have to figure out licensing for themselves (ex. you could probably use the Community license for the GenericServices repo here, but people like me or any of your clients using GenericServices would have to get their own license based on their eligibility).

I'm not in much of a hurry to deal with licensing changes :) but it will need to happen at some point, so I was just hoping to get some feedback on any plans you might have for GenericServices to help determine the direction we might want to go when the time comes. Thanks for any feedback and for all your hard work!

[JonPSmith]

Hi @aaron-kruse,

Sorry for the slow response, we were on holiday and work on our house.

Thanks for letting me know about AutoMapper licensing change - I'm retired and have alzheimer's disease (go the end of this article how that effects my programming) so I'm going to the simplest approach, which is to update when .NET 10 comes and keep to AutoMapper 14 version.

If you need the new features in AutoMapper 15 you can copy the code and update AutoMapper and add your LicenseKey.

PS. I think I will OK to update my open source the six app that need updated this year (2025) when .NET comes out (see all my NuGet open sources here). I'm managing my alzheimer's disease but some time I won't be able to do that so I created this article to you can update one on my open source apps if I can't do that.