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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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[–] LeFantome 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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).