[Open question] Why are so many rust opensource projects MIT licensed?

opensource.org The most popular licenses for each language in 2023

The 2023 report of the licenses in use by the biggest package managers highlights the need to educate developers on the importance of licensing information. While many developers know that…

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?

Technology @lemmy.world

Open question

Why are so many open-source projects, particularly projects written in Rust, MIT licensed?

opensource.org /blog/the-most-popular-licenses-for-each-language-2023

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36 comments

MIT is the de-facto license that says "Do what you want with the software, just give me credit. Also, I don't owe you anything".
It lets people do basically anything with it but protects you from:
People who would steal your project and claim they were the original creators (your name and copyright info is filled in the license which they have to include and mention)
Any sort of liability or warranty - people can't blame you for any damage done by your software
- Don't GNU, MPL, EUPL, and other opensource licenses do the same? Why is MIT favoured?
  Anti Commercial-AI license
  
  those are less permissive. mit license says "you want to make a new version and sell it? go ahead! be my guest" think of it as being the apache license with fewer words
  
  You can sell GPL software, even without any changes. The less permission part would be "You want to close-source it and not contribute back? Go ahead!"
  
  GPL forces those who fork the project to open-source their contributions; same for MPL though GPL requires open-sourcing more things. EUPL is a bit obscure.

36 comments