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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

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Do you maybe have a guess why non-corporations use MIT?

"Here's my project do what you want, or don't, with it I don't care"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Relicense it as GPL and see how little they care what you do with it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] bitfucker 3 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

One caveat is that if you fork and release it you have to release it under the same license.

[–] onlinepersona 1 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

[–] bitfucker 17 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

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.