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?

  • kata1yst@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    4 days ago

    I think it’s at least partially a cultural thing. I used to participate in the ZFS ecosystem. ZFS got kinda burned by having it’s spread limited due to it’s pre-existing license, but found a home in the BSD ecosystem.

    Once burned twice shy. So add-ons, extensions, etc were defacto BSD 3 Clause licensed in that community to avoid that issue moving forward.

    I could only speculate why MIT is used a lot in the rust community, but if you’re taking inspiration from a half dozen other successful projects and you see them all MIT licensed, you’re probably going to lean towards MIT when picking your own.