Context:
Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.
Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.
Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.
Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.
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.
Why not put the code in public domain then? Why MIT?
Two reasons:
- public domain is not very well legally recognized, so code licensed under MIT is easier to use internationally than code in public domain.
- MIT includes disclaimer of liability, which as an author you want just to be safe.
See that’s the thing, all licenses want to draw up some boundaries. As far as I’m concerned MIT and GPL are just interested in different ones.
Licenses aren’t “restrictive”, they’re permissive. Without a license you can’t do anything with the content, a license gives you some rights instead of none.
