Disappointed by the article as it doesn’t really compare MIT with anything comparable. Yes, if you wanted a copyleft license then MIT is a poor fit because it is not one. But if all you want to do is rehash the GPL vs. permissive licenses why single out MIT specifically out of the breadth of of other permissive open-source licenses?
At the very least the title is misleading.
I’m not a programmer, but what exactly stops people from using Creative Commons licences? If nothing, why isn’t it standard practice to see some bit of code be released as “CC BY-SA”, and others “CC 0” (etc)?
I’m not a lawyer, but the argument I always hear is that the Creative Commons licenses don’t directly say anything about software and don’t cover any of the unique ways in which software can be used. If you were to use a creative commons license on your code, it’d be mostly up to interpretation how the more abstract language of “works” applies to it, which is something that hasn’t (to my knowledge) been decided in a court
There is also the lack of patent protection issue: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/25/fedora_sours_on_creative_commons/
I am also not the biggest fan of the MIT License for the reasons mentioned in this article. There also is the LGPL as a permissive version of the GPL and I wonder how it really differs from MIT.
LGPL is not permissive in the sense BSD, MIT, Apache, Python, etc. are. LGPL is still strongly copyleft, the only real difference from GPL is that it allows you to incorporate it into larger piece of work that isn’t under GPL, provided you allow the user to freely modify and replace the LGPL parts. As a result it really doesn’t make much sense for anything but dynamically linked libraries that can be easily replaced.
On the other hand permissive licenses allow you to relicense the work completely. They have been deliberately created (often by universities) to be used regardless of commercial or proprietary status.
Probably best illustrating example is the Berkeley socket interface that single-handedly became the way to implement internet enabled applications for virtually any OS (including some implementation bugs)
Thanks for the explanation. :)
