linuxmemes

The MIT license guarantees freedom for developers. The GPL guarantees freedom for end users.

People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don't know what they're doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company "taking" your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.

For example, OpenBSD has as a project goal: "We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to."

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as "cuck licenses")

That's where I stopped reading. 👎

I published some packages under MIT a couple of years ago. It is difficult to understand at first, I was happy with the license because anyone could use it like they want.

Today, I understand that I want to use GPL. With GPL everyone can use the code like they want and I can use their code like I want.

If I choose MIT it's because I don't care if people "steal" the code. This meme is stupid and condescending, if he didn't mind that Intel used it's code it's because he didn't mind, that why he chose MIT. Why is Intel beating him in the meme? It makes no sense. You are proyecting your thoughts onto him as if that's how he felt, but then you show that he didn't feel the same way you do. Why?

When I see a GPL license I don't see freedom. I only see forced openness, which makes me immediately avoid that library, since I can't statically link to it.

Freedom means that everyone can use your code. Yes, that means for-profit corporations. For free, without restrictions.

If I want to make a piece of software to improve people's lives and I don't care to do it for free, I'll choose MIT. If it gets "stolen" by a for-profit corporation it only makes it better, because now my software has reached more people, thus (theoretically) improving their lives.

There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do

Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind

Today OP was very dumb and showed his ignorance of the concept "I do whatever I fucking want." Don't be like OP.

people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license

They're free to change the licence of future versions. OP also failed at understanding the concept of licences. He's such a silly moron!

MIT license is useful for a lot of stuff that is traditionally monetized. Game development tools, for example. I don't think a game engine could become very popular if you had to release your game's source code for free.

Permissive licenses have their place, a reason Godot engine for games has become appealing is MIT.

Are we really going to start this pointless discussion again? They are two licenses with different use cases and different considerations. GPL has a lot more mental overhead to using it, MIT is hands off, both of these aren't inherently invalid.

Also Tanenbaum in your own link mentions that Intel probably would have just written their own microkernel if need be.

AI tools have turned them all into MIT licenses

I could imagine MIT might be interesting for Software released by public institutions, that are meant to be used by the industry in any way they want. Sometimes earning money with your product might even be impossible due to restrictions. So, not really Software released with the FOSS philosophy.

Otherwise I also never really understood why anyone would use the MIT license.

The two licenses have distinct use cases, and only overlap for some definitions of "free" software. I also think both the comic artist and OP set up a fallacious argument. I'll add that in no way do I support Intel's shenanigans here.

The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product. This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one, situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed, and all cases where the author's intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn't mind). From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it's a really bad argument.

But don't take it from me, learn from the master of logic himself.

commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”

This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy, by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing. Permissive licenses absolutely do allow others to modify code without limit, but that is suggested to be a bad thing on moral grounds alone. That said, I'd love to see a citation here because that's the first I've heard of this pejorative used to describe software licensing.

Controversial opinion: Copyleft is actually more free than permissive licenses.

Because the way the GPL works is how the world would be if there were no licenses and no copyright at all. Because then anything made public is free to use. And if I were to reverse-engineer a binary then I could still add that code to my software.

But since we live in a world where we play make-believe that you can make something public and still "own it" at the same time (e.g. copyright) and where using reverse-engineered code can still get you into legal trouble, the GPL is using their own silly logic against them (like fighting fire with fire) to create a bubble of software that acts like a world without any licenses.

Permissive licenses don't do that, they allow your open software to just get repurposed under a non-free paradigm which could never occur in a world with no licenses. And so ironically permissive licensing in a world that is (artifically) non-permissive by default does not reflect a world with no licenses, and is thus less free than Copyleft.

I am a consultant who sometimes writes code to do certain useful things as part of larger systems (parts of which may be commercial or GPL) but my clients always try to impose terms in their contracts with me which say that anything I develop immediately becomes theirs, which limits my ability to use it in my next project. I can to some extent circumvent this if I find a way to publish the work, or some essential part of it, under an MIT license. I'm never going to make money off of my code directly; at best it's middleware, and my competitors don't use the same stack, so I'm not giving them any real advantage... I don't see how I'm sabotaging myself in this situation; if anything the MIT license is a way of securing my freedom and it benefits my future customers as well since I don't have to rebuild from scratch every time.

this one?

The MIT is still a free software license. It is completely valid to use it from a Foss perspective.

I'm an idiot making a thing, and I need to pick a license. Where's a good place to talk to people more knowledgeable than myself on the subject?

EDIT: so my thing isn't software, i probably should have mentioned that. I am making a ruleset and setting for something similar to but not exactly a tabletop rpg. The ORC license sounds promising, but the legalese makes my brain gray out. ChatGPT tells me to use a version of the Creative Commons license, but ChatGPT isn't exactly reliable.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did.

Yeah, duh. Intelligent people read licenses before they pick one.

But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

That's like signing a contract before reading it and then complaining that it contains provisions that surprise you when they are enacted. I'm baffled on a regular basis by how many people understand FOSS licenses only on the basis for hearsay, for example when people insist that GPLed source code must be made available free of charge for everyone. The GNU project has a FAQ about the GPL that spells it out that this is not the case and yet hardly anyone discussing FOSS licenses has even read the FAQ.