this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
93 points (98.9% liked)

Opensource

5757 readers
114 users here now

A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!

CreditsIcon base by Lorc under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

⠀

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
pylapp@programming.dev
93
[Open question] Why are so many ~~rust~~ opensource projects MIT licensed? (opensource.org)
submitted 9 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/opensource@programming.dev
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] novaTopFlex@programming.dev 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Unfortunately, open-source software is quickly being coopted in many communities, particularly due to corporate influences, such as Microsoft (with GitHub, WSL, etc.) or Red Hat (closing down RHEL). Corporations must use open-source, and GPL (which I am a strong believer of, by the way) does not allow most corporations to use the software, as the software must remain free-and-open-source (FOSS).

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 2 points 9 months ago

MIT license predates the GPL. Tiny projects like X chose it many decades ago.

Most Open Source software is written by corporations.

Probably the largest developer of GPL software is Red Hat. I will avoid responding to the “closing down” of RHEL except to ask how Alma and Rocky are doing. Pretty well I believe.

Permissive licenses like MIT and Apache require the software to “remain free-and-open-source (FOSS)”. That is “the software” released under those licenses (not some future software that has not been written yet).

WSL is Open Source.

But don’t let the facts get in the way.

load more comments (2 replies)