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