this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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[Open question] Why are so many ~~rust~~ opensource projects MIT licensed? (opensource.org)
submitted 2 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/opensource@programming.dev
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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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[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 54 points 2 months ago (15 children)

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.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 10 points 2 months ago (13 children)

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

[–] bluGill@fedia.io 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

If you want to spread rust corporations using it is part of spreading.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I do not know what you're on about. Care to explain?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] bluGill@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Part of a useful language is a library of various utilites. If the library is behind a license you cannot accept the library may as well not exist - and thus the language is less useful.

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