[HN Gopher] The Origin of the "MIT License" (2020)
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The Origin of the "MIT License" (2020)
Author : tkhattra
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-02-03 01:45 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ieeexplore.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ieeexplore.ieee.org)
| froh wrote:
| so a most liberal and a most intrusive concept of software
| freedom both originate at MIT.
| icambron wrote:
| I took a class from Saltzer in 2002 or 2003 and it was
| spectacular. A sort of survey-level runthrough of software
| architecture and system design. He seemed to really enjoy
| teaching it too.
| ghaff wrote:
| The article provides some early on documentation that I wasn't
| able to find when I wrote the piece referenced in footnote 1. [0]
| It doesn't really get into--I suspect because no one is really
| sure what/when the changes happened--how the various changes in
| wording it mentions towards the end eventually morphed into the
| current (OSI-approved) MIT license.
|
| The current license actually matches a related but different
| license than the X11 license and at least one open source IP
| lawyer I know suspects there may have been a minor mixup when the
| "MIT license" was approved by OSI.
|
| [0] https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
| thelastbender12 wrote:
| Neat to know MIT License did actually originate at the eponymous
| institution.
|
| When I first got access to the internet, MIT seemed awfully
| productive in producing code. Before I found out that MIT License
| doesn't imply the work was done by a person at MIT!
| dctoedt wrote:
| FTA: "As it turned out, the licensing strategy had the desired
| effect: the goal of influence was realized. ...
|
| "Furthermore, the good will that was gained from free
| distribution of these software packages led to the flow back of
| both funding and software applications that support research and
| education at MIT. The cash flow has dwarfed the forgone revenue
| stream that likely would have come from licensing for a fee, and
| even that sum has been dwarfed by the value of the applications
| that became available.
|
| "A lesson is that it can be important to look past the prospect
| of licensing for a fee, which may bring in a few dollars, and
| instead see the opportunity that opens if you give the software
| away. The potential reward can be orders of magnitude larger."
|
| (Extra paragraphing added.)
| bhickey wrote:
| I asked rms and Hal Abelson about this a few years ago.
|
| Stallman said:
|
| > The term "MIT license" is a confusion. It is used to describe
| two different licenses; see https://gnu.org/licenses/license-
| list.html. We call them the X11 license and the Expat license. To
| distinguish them, we do not use the term "MIT license". The X11
| license was, as far as I know, first used by X11. I don't know
| how it was written -- the question is not interesting to me.
|
| Thanks Richard.
|
| Hal recalled that it was drafted by Karen Hershey at the request
| of the Technology Transfer Office. Regretfully I don't have a
| copy of his original response.
| ghaff wrote:
| Right. The modern MIT license approved by the OSI is the same
| as the license used for the Expat XML parser library beginning
| in about 1998. It's similar, but not identical, to the X11
| license. No one seems to be sure how the Expat license ended up
| as the MIT license.
|
| That said, it's more than a bit pedantic not to use the term
| "MIT license" given that all the licenses in that stream are
| quite similar and certainly in the same permissive spirit.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > it's more than a bit pedantic not to use the term "MIT
| license"
|
| From Stallman? Who would have guessed.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Interesting timeline, seems the MIT License came out a few years
| before the GPL. I wonder if/what discussions RMS had with the
| authors of the MIT License at that time when he was crafting the
| GPL.
| tehologist wrote:
| From my understanding GPL originated because Stallman was upset
| about a version of Emacs he was working on at school (MIT
| Licensed). The person he was working on it with took the source
| code and started a commercial company, but had no interest in
| working with Stallman professionally. So Stallman started his
| free software crusade with his own version of Emacs and
| replicating every tool needed to build it with his own "FREE"
| license. This has always bothered me as GPL is far more strict
| of a license than either BSD or MIT.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I agree it is far more strict, but I am glad it exists. I do
| throw the MIT license on most of my projects, so its rare
| that I license things with GPL. But at the end of the day,
| having the BSD and MIT license and the GPL licenses gives us
| all the options we want. Want to produce something and don't
| care how it gets used? MIT or BSD license. Want to create
| something, offer it for free, and know that nobody will
| modify your code and start selling it? GPL.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Want to create something, offer it for free, and know that
| nobody will modify your code and start selling it? GPL.
|
| Someone can absolutely do that. They just need to share the
| modified source code.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| > Want to create something, offer it for free, and know
| that nobody will modify your code and start selling it?
| GPL.
|
| You can modify somebody's GPLed code and start selling it.
| The only restriction is that you must offer to share your
| source code with your customers and give them all of the
| same rights you have under GPL.
|
| There is also a loophole that lets you sell modified GPLed
| code without sharing the source or giving them your GPL
| rights: run it on a server. AGPL closes this loophole which
| is why it is unpopular with large tech companies.
|
| Any license that prohibits selling modified versions of
| somebody else's code would, if it became popular or was
| adopted by a popular project, be denounced by both FSF and
| OSI for violating the principles of the FOSS movement
| because the right to sell other people's FOSS software is
| considered an important user freedom. Writing such a
| license involves making fairly trivial changes to MIT or
| BSD but does make it impossible to combine any code
| licensed under it with GPLed code.
| npteljes wrote:
| Yes, and the specific strictness is the point! The point is
| that there isn't really such a things as "no laws". Dynamics
| between people don't stop to function just because there are
| no laws applied. The most basic thing is that if you don't
| restrict the use of force effectively, then the use of force
| will most certainly determine the order of things - you end
| up with tyrants, or warlords, essentially.
|
| Translating this to the world of software licenses, similar
| things happen. With MIT, and BSD, an entity can take the
| project and just run with it. Neither the original owner, nor
| the ecosystem benefits. This is cool with some people, in
| theory, but from time to time, significant regret is
| demonstrated, of which my favorite is Tanenbaum learning from
| the media that Intel uses his system in all of the CPUs.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/minix-creator-letter-
| intel...
|
| I also recommend contemplating the "Paradox of tolerance" - a
| similar situation. It posits that in order to have a
| sustainable tolerant society, one must not tolerate
| intolerance - for if we do, it will take over, ending the
| tolerant society.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > This has always bothered me as GPL is far more strict of a
| license than either BSD or MIT.
|
| In a similar manner, democracy is far more strict than
| anarchy because you can't kill and loot whatever you want.
|
| Yes, I'm comparing murder and theft with taking away users'
| freedom. Yes, murder and theft are probably considered worse
| than proprietary software in the eyes of many. My point is
| that just because something is more restrictive, doesn't in
| itself make it worse.
| tehologist wrote:
| I avoid GPL projects because I am a software developer and
| the idea of the project dictating how I can release my own
| source is a big FU to me. If I can find software that is
| licensed with a non restrictive license I will always
| support it over anything that is GPL. I have had a few
| projects I was very interested in and considered helping
| out on, but the GPL license is a non starter for me.
|
| If you have to redefine the word "FREE" to mean freedom and
| your license is several pages of lawyer speak, then that is
| a problem.
|
| I will take anarchy over crazy ideology any day of the
| week.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > I avoid GPL projects because I am a software developer
| and the idea of the project dictating how I can release
| my own source is a big FU to me.
|
| GPL doesn't restrict how you can release your own source
| code - even if you release your project as GPL, you can
| still release it under MIT, or a commercial license -
| it's your code, and you're the copyright holder. The
| restrictions only apply to code derived from other GPL
| projects, but that isn't really "your code".
|
| Your reason for avoiding GPL seems to be that you cannot
| take GPL code and release it under a non-free license.
| That's exactly the behavior that GPL is designed to
| prevent - the bottom line is users' freedom, not
| developers' convenience.
| ghaff wrote:
| I generally favor permissive licenses myself for various
| reasons.
|
| However, the relevant perspective on the GPL is that it's
| not really about freedom for developers. It's about
| freedom for users. If I as a developer/company want to
| ship modified FOSS to end-users. I can't hold the
| modifications back as secret sauce.
| lukeh wrote:
| Noting that MIT Kerberos isn't shipped with macOS or Windows,
| although it compiles in both.
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