this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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MIT allows the publication of derived work to be closed source, GPL doesn't. Thus, at least for corporations, it is an advantage to publish some code, e.g. libraries with MIT licence, so that it can become a commonly used "standard implementation", while their end user software remains closed source.
This is why i like publishing under LGPL, people can still use it in proprietary software but the library itself is better protected.
Thank you. That would explain why corporations use it (and the Apache license), however my guess is that most opensource projects aren't corporate. Do you maybe have a guess why non-corporations use MIT?
Anti Commercial-AI license
You would be surprised. A lot are written by people as part of their job or so they can use them for their job or being sponsored by a company to do the work. The people with the most time to contribute library code to rust are being paid to do it in one form or another.
"Here's my project do what you want, or don't, with it I don't care"
Relicense it as GPL and see how little they care what you do with it.
What a stupid argument, that's literally only thing the license asks, is to keep the original license and not sue them because you shot at your own dick.
It doesn't change in any way or form how you can use the software though
Isn't it to keep the copyright notice and not the license itself? I.e, you may redistribute it with a different license term and conditions but the copyright notice must be retained. I don't know how different it is tho in legal speak. Maybe they are equivalent.
One caveat is that if you fork and release it you have to release it under the same license.
Are you saying it's not a conscious choice? They're just going with what they consider to be the default and that happens to be MIT?
Anti Commercial-AI license
No.
MIT : "Here is my project. Do whatever, I don't care. Just put my name in a credit somewhere."
GPL (assuming FSF stance on linking is used) : "Here is my project. Oh, you want to use my project and distribute your project that uses my project? Make your whole project open source too."
BSD-3 : "Here is my project. Credit me and do whatever but, don't use my name to promote your usage."
And many more nuances on other licenses like patents and whatnot. The problem is, the average person does not care to enforce it.
I don’t think that’s what they’re saying.
MIT license is more permissive than other open source licenses. That’s intentional. The authors want anyone to use their code anyway they like—open, closed, whatever.
No, but they want to have the most permissive license so that anyone with interest in it can take and use it, without having to worry about licenses.
If you want to spread rust corporations using it is part of spreading.
I do not know what you're on about. Care to explain?
Anti Commercial-AI license
Part of a useful language is a library of various utilites. If the library is behind a license you cannot accept the library may as well not exist - and thus the language is less useful.