cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/30924455
A few people pointed out that many [R]ust 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?
The crux of it is that it allows for commercial use without needing to distribute the source code. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on who you ask. There’s basically a continuum for open source software with GPLv3 at one end and MIT at the other.
GPLv3 guarantees that corporations can’t play games with patents or weird DRM to hobble an open source library and tie it to their closed source product. A lot of corporations will specifically bar employees from using GPLv3 code out of fear it could force them to open source their proprietary code as well.
At the other extreme you’ve got MIT which basically says do what you want with it. Fork it, embed it in your projects, sell copies of it if you want. Anything goes as long as you include a copy of the MIT license along with your software.
Rust tends to get a lot of commercial usage so GPLv2 or MIT tend to be chosen over GPlv3, and between them most companies feel more comfortable with MIT.
I don’t have any reason to think this is particular to Rust. The MIT license is popular because it’s permissive, simple, and well-known. Developers often choose it when they want to maximize a project’s reach.
There is good reason to think it is not just rust.
Because it helps the corporations. And makes everything easier to static linking I guess which is default.
If you want to put an idea out there, permissive licenses are the most likely to promote it. Any individual or organization can use it without restrictions (or restrictions that aren’t unpalatable to most). So if what you’re trying to promote is an idea, a technique, or a standard, this type of license allows it to have the greatest reach.
People seem to forget that most of the open source language library code out there is written by people working for companies, being sponsored by companies or writing it so they can use it where they work. Some might start out as hobbiest projects but if it survives and grows it eventually will be sponsored in some form. Even if indirectly by some guy that wants to use it where he works.
From what i understand if you wrote it you can just license the public version via GPL and license the private version that you wrote for your job what ever you want since you own it.
This assumes you wrote the project without company tools and on your free time.
You can always use your own code however you want. However, if your project starts to get contributions from other people, that’s where it can start to become more muddy.
It’s an easy license to reason about, allows for basically any project to use it, and you don’t need to worry about trying to enforce it (Because the GPL is only as good as your lawyers are)
There’s a GPL compliance lawsuit going on where they’re suing as a user under contract law, instead of as the copyright holder. Perhaps you can say the GPL is as good as anyone’s lawyers, in the near future.
True, that’d definitely make it a lot more viable to hold corporations to account.
I’m not a Rust programmer, but I’ve released a lot of code under MIT in the past and my reason for picking it was because it was so simple and flexible when it comes to reusing it with code under other licenses.
I recall once, years ago, a user coming to me quite angry about how I was releasing code under a license that permitted corporations to “steal” it. Just for him I dual-licensed that particular bit of code under MIT and GPL. He never responded so I guess that satisfied him? Whatever, I’m just happy he went away.
Some claim they value their users having the “most” freedom. However, since MIT permits code use within proprietary software then that would exclude downstream users (users of their users, ad infinitum).
I would like to use my projects in work, I can’t force them to open everything, because I would have to find something else.
All my shit is MIT because I don’t seriously respect copyright in the first place.
I understand GPL for big-ass projects which expect new contributions to help stone-soup their way to higher quality… but fucking Blender is permissively licensed. Godot is permissively licensed. If your thing matters enough for someone to steal it, you’re probably doing fine with voluntary contributions back to the original project.
And that’s for whole products. Libraries and shit? Yeah, obviously permissive is preferable. I don’t want to have to change how I license some code based on someone else’s solution, and I’m a fucking nobody. Commercial projects aren’t even looking at anything pushier than LGPL. And that’s fine! Anything proprietary and important is on borrowed time if they’re even thinking about open-source. Either they’re not making enough to just do shit themselves, or the aggressively open alternatives are roughly as good as all their money could afford.
The slow victory of open source is that it’s really goddamn difficult to compete with free.
