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?

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    5·
    4 days ago

    Permissive licenses are trending in popularity vs copyleft. As a “newer” ecosystem, the Rest-dev culture skews towards permissive.

    Why are permissive licenses popular?

    Most Open Source software is written by companies.

    “Permissive” licenses offer more flexibility and compatibility while minimizing future legal complications. You can replace the word flexibility with the word freedom if you wish. By compatibility, I mean it can be combined with code using other licenses. So no “we cannot combine ZFS and Linux” type problems.

    MIT offers the absolute minimum of legal footprint and maximum compatibility.

    The above are attributes companies value.

    On the other side of the “freedom” front, licenses like MIT guarantee all of the “4 freedoms” that groups like the Free Software Foundation talks about with adding an restrictions on the freedoms of others.

    So, why doesn’t everybody use MIT? The patent guarantees in Apache 2.0 are useful if you are ok with the added complexity (still permissive but more legalese).