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[Open question] Why are so many ~~rust~~ opensource projects MIT licensed? (opensource.org)

submitted 1 week ago by onlinepersona to c/opensource

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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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[–] popcar2 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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:

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)
Any sort of liability or warranty - people can't blame you for any damage done by your software

[–] onlinepersona 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Don't GNU, MPL, EUPL, and other opensource licenses do the same? Why is MIT favoured?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

those are less permissive. mit license says "you want to make a new version and sell it? go ahead! be my guest" think of it as being the apache license with fewer words

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

You can sell GPL software, even without any changes. The less permission part would be "You want to close-source it and not contribute back? Go ahead!"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

GPL forces those who fork the project to open-source their contributions; same for MPL though GPL requires open-sourcing more things. EUPL is a bit obscure.