- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
A few people pointed out that many rust projects were MIT licensed and since then I indeed have seen MIT licensed projects everywhere in Rust. Then I found the link of this post and it looks like MIT was by far the most popular license in all of opensource in 2023.
Any ideas why?
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MIT is the de-facto license that says “Do what you want with the software, just give me credit. Also, I don’t owe you anything”.
It lets people do basically anything with it but protects you from:
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People who would steal your project and claim they were the original creators (your name and copyright info is filled in the license which they have to include and mention)
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Any sort of liability or warranty - people can’t blame you for any damage done by your software
Don’t GNU, MPL, EUPL, and other opensource licenses do the same? Why is MIT favoured?
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Unfortunately, open-source software is quickly being coopted in many communities, particularly due to corporate influences, such as Microsoft (with GitHub, WSL, etc.) or Red Hat (closing down RHEL). Corporations must use open-source, and GPL (which I am a strong believer of, by the way) does not allow most corporations to use the software, as the software must remain free-and-open-source (FOSS).
Not really, you can charge for GPL software, but you must always provide the source and anyone may redistribute those
MIT license predates the GPL. Tiny projects like X chose it many decades ago.
Most Open Source software is written by corporations.
Probably the largest developer of GPL software is Red Hat. I will avoid responding to the “closing down” of RHEL except to ask how Alma and Rocky are doing. Pretty well I believe.
Permissive licenses like MIT and Apache require the software to “remain free-and-open-source (FOSS)”. That is “the software” released under those licenses (not some future software that has not been written yet).
WSL is Open Source.
But don’t let the facts get in the way.
Unfortunately
Depends on how you look at it.
I think some would argue that the competition and rapid innovation garnered by companies who are more freely able to leverage existing software in capitalist society, and the products and services they bring because of it, might be a net positive for the world, in comparison to the alternative.
I think if you were to go down the path of what many FOSS zealots seem to want (not capitalism), you end up with a system that does not promote competition, and people get tired of nothing happening, and society as a whole may not progress much.
The rust community cares more about the spread of rust than the long term user freedom problem that the GPL/AGPL solves.
If you click the link, you’ll see that Rust projects are no exception in their use of MIT. Do you believe other programming language communities also just care about spreading?
Obligatory link to https://choosealicense.com/ - which gives some guidance and overview of license differences
This is not a rust thing. Most popular languages with a library distribution system favour permissive licence like MIT Apache 2.0 or BSD or similar.
More mainstream languages are that way because cooperations use them - most people learn a d use the language that will get them a job or the ones used by where they work. And if the language it tooling and libraries where not permissive they would likely not be allowed to be used in a lot of companies.
And most of the libraries written for languages these days are done by people paid to do it, either directly by being hired or sponsored to do so or so they can be used when they are at work. The GPL would basically not allow the vast number of people who are writing code from using the library.
Techbros love MIT
Permissive licenses are trending in popularity vs copyleft. As a “newer” ecosystem, the Rest-dev culture skews towards permissive.
Why are permissive licenses popular?
Most Open Source software is written by companies.
“Permissive” licenses offer more flexibility and compatibility while minimizing future legal complications. You can replace the word flexibility with the word freedom if you wish. By compatibility, I mean it can be combined with code using other licenses. So no “we cannot combine ZFS and Linux” type problems.
MIT offers the absolute minimum of legal footprint and maximum compatibility.
The above are attributes companies value.
On the other side of the “freedom” front, licenses like MIT guarantee all of the “4 freedoms” that groups like the Free Software Foundation talks about with adding an restrictions on the freedoms of others.
So, why doesn’t everybody use MIT? The patent guarantees in Apache 2.0 are useful if you are ok with the added complexity (still permissive but more legalese).
It’s a multi-decade tradition that goes back to Project Athena, a collaboration between MIT, DEC, and IBM. X11’s reference implementation has been the main flag-bearer of the license, propagating it forward to many freedesktop.org projects.
