Why I use the MIT licence (by author of Rack)

http://chneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2009/08/why-i-use-the-mit-license.html

by Pistos2 • 17 years ago

39 44 17 years ago

elbenshira2• 17 years ago

I use the MIT license for all my projects because it's simple and sensible. I want to code and not worry about the politics. The MIT license gives me that.

lamby• 17 years ago

It might be simple, but I don't agree that using a permissive license is apolitical. Understanding this, passing your views off as "pragmatic" seems dishonest.

The OP links to djb's site - he seems to conflate rejecting EULAs (which I agree with) and rejecting copyright on software; am I reading him correctly? (I mention him here because nobody can claim his stance is pragmatic at all.)

elbenshira2• 17 years ago

I mean "politics" in the sense that the MIT license is concise, unlike the GPL.

mjgoins• 17 years ago

I think you are correct in identifying a conflation of eula with copyright. In fact I don't understand why the link to djb is there at all, even given that conflation.

jmillikin4• 17 years ago

I realize “bad guys” don’t cease to exist—whether they “steal”, don’t share, lock up code, or have business models in mind you don’t like. But it’s not my fault they are that way, and neither it is my job to “teach them lessons”.

I don't think any significant body of code is written or licensed for punitive reasons. The difference between the MIT and copyleft licenses such as CC-BY-SA or the GPL is that the MIT license does not protect your users from hostile middlemen.

Tichy4• 17 years ago

Please elaborate? Middlemen as in people making my code malicious and pass it off as my code? How would that work?

jmillikin4• 17 years ago

If a middleman takes your code, compiles it, and then distributes it to the user, then that user has no access to the source code to the version installed on their system. This is one of the events the GPL is designed to guard against.

In an ideal world, everybody would provide their users the same rights they received from the copyright holder. The only licenses required would be MIT/BSD style. I would love this; a simple license, in my opinion, is better than the enormous complexity of the GPL. However, since in the real world people can and do restrict user's rights to source code, the GPL is still needed.

railsjedi• 17 years ago

I totally agree. When you put something open source, generally the more people use it the better. GPL often just causes problems. MIT is simple, and lets anyone do anything. If I open source something, that's what I use. Otherwise I keep it closed.

Pistos22• 17 years ago

The main reason I use MIT is so that I can use my open source code in my own commercial endeavours without "infecting" that commercial codebase, which needs to remain closed source.

jsonscripter• 17 years ago

And you have every right to do that with the GNU Public License too, by the way.

gthank• 17 years ago

Just to be clear, the reason that is the case is because the GP owns the copyright in the described scenario.

Pistos22• 17 years ago

Please clarify. (IANAL, and so) this isn't entirely clear. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GP... http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GP...

antonovka6• 17 years ago

Only if you own the copyright for the entire body of work. If you receive external contributions, you must request copyright assignment from contributors to allow you (and only you) to use the work for any purpose under any license.

Pro-GPL arguments are full of these silly caveats.

"You can still sell the software" -- so can anyone else, or they can just give it away for free. Now what?

"You can use it under any license you want" -- only if you acquire full copyright for every single contribution.

"You can sell services!" -- end users don't buy "services" for consumer software.

"Non-GPL software is immoral" -- guess who buys the "services" that cover your development costs? Companies that ... sell proprietary software.

.. and just to demonstrate the total rational disconnect of the primary GPL advocate, Mr. Stallman:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.devel/2963

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.devel/2970

steveklabnik• 17 years ago

I use the WTFPL when I'm feeling silly, otherwise, I use BSD, which is basically MIT anyway.

Then again, so is the WTFPL.

While I don't have any closed source considerations, I also don't really care what happens with my code. If anyone finds it useful, I'm happy.

mattculbreth• 17 years ago

What Zed Shaw said

cousin_it• 17 years ago

First, I live and code in Germany, where you can’t place things into the public domain without already being dead for a long time.

Is that true? In Germany you're forbidden to make stuff and give it away?

Tichy4• 17 years ago

I think you can not give away the Copyright to things, but I am not sure if that has any practical implications, as Copyright is just one of many rights. Most contracts by publishers manage to get the rights to do with your stuff whatever they want anyway.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

In Germany (and some other jurisdictions), you're forbidden to unilaterally disclaim responsibility for something you've written, which the public domain implies. Instead, you can only assert that there's no warranty (for example) via license (and/or contract, I guess?). Explicitly placing things in the public domain has a history in the US, but actually is not directly supported by law even there, only precedent.

silentbicycle4• 17 years ago

There's a Google tech talk with Dr. D. Richard Hipp* (the primary author of SQLite), and he mentions that his decision to release SQLite under the public domain (for simplicity's sake) had surprising consequences -- in his words, the public domain doesn't exist for software in Europe, and several EU companies decided it would be prudent to pay a nominal fee in exchange for a custom, perpetual license from him.

IANAL, etc., but that's a lead if you want to investigate further. (He didn't specify what countries in Europe, but strongly implied it was the case throughout.)

* http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5160435487953918649

billswift2• 17 years ago

It's possible that putting things in the public domain is no longer allowed even in the US. Peter Saint-Andre puts all of his work in the public domain, but he wrote an essay with links almost three years ago discussing among other things that it may not be legal https://stpeter.im/index.php/2006/12/30/pd-howto/ . He has a lot of other writings about PD and copyright issues here : https://stpeter.im/index.php/category/publicdomain/ . Note for those using IE; IE does not recognize his CA, you need to either click through or change the https to http.

Why I use the MIT licence (by author of Rack)

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