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

  • kata1yst@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    5 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.