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

I think it's at least partially a cultural thing. I used to participate in the ZFS ecosystem. ZFS got kinda burned by having it's spread limited due to it's pre-existing license, but found a home in the BSD ecosystem.

Once burned twice shy. So add-ons, extensions, etc were defacto BSD 3 Clause licensed in that community to avoid that issue moving forward.

I could only speculate why MIT is used a lot in the rust community, but if you're taking inspiration from a half dozen other successful projects and you see them all MIT licensed, you're probably going to lean towards MIT when picking your own.