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The MIT License, Line by Line
- notRobot 6y ago(2016)
- flixic 6y agoIt's not like anything in the license has changed since late 80s.
- ghaff 6y agoThat's not quite true. Sometime in the 1990s, before the OSI version became the canonical one, it seems to have morphed from a variant of the X Consortium license to the ECMA license. [1] But, yes, nothing has changed in the past 20 years. [1] https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
- ghaff 6y agoDuh, that should be Expat license, not ECMA.
- aklemm 6y agoAt risk of piling on, it is silly to cargo-cult dating articles. This is a case where the date truly is not relevant, and that should be recognized. That's a minor point compared to the larger phenomenon which is the insistence on recency for our attention. Why? Probably because the long tail isn't profitable enough, but it is a shame every portal onto the 'net except archive.org and wikipedia.org insist on recency for relevance.
- detaro 6y agoProviding a date for context is not "insisting on recency for relevance", it's providing context. Even if that context is just that some people recognize "ok, that's the article I read a while back and not an updated version".
- shawnz 6y agoIn fact the author did later post a follow-up highly critical of the MIT license, recommending their own creation instead: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice...
- rdpintqogeogsaa 6y agoI would be interested in reading a similar piece from the perspective of someone with a background in the law of continental Europe. I adore this piece of writing, but it's very U.S.-centric in parts.
- derefr 6y agoI think most of this (other than the historical references) is in reference to the effective “strong minimum standards” of the Berne Convention, and to the later treaties established between WIPO member nations. Therefore, it’s almost† globally applicable. † From Wikipedia, WIPO non-members: Kosovo, Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, South Sudan, and the states with limited recognition. Palestine has observer status.
- rdpintqogeogsaa 6y agoThe devil is, however, most often in the details. Lines such as > United States law calculates copyright terms differently for individual and “corporate” authors. make me wonder what it is like in, say, France or Germany.
- ben_bai 6y agoIn Germany Copyright (Urheberrecht) is always with the original author and can not be sold or given to somebody else. It can be inherited. One can sell or give permission the right to publish, duplicate, whatever (Verwertungsrecht). Writing a book on company time and money automatically awards the company the rights to publish, make money, etc. Writing a book in you spare time with "work related knowledge" might award the company with a claim for buying (at fair value) the publishing rights. If you write a bestseller on company time you might also be entitled to a compensation in addition to your payrole. (But always best to have a contract beforehand) But on the whole Germany is in the Berne convention.
- ghaff 6y agoYes, my understanding is that is one of the reasons why trying to just place something in the public domain is problematic in various countries in continental Europe. There are potentially issues in other countries as well but "moral rights" aren't really a problem in common law countries.
- systemvoltage 6y ago> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. What’s the reasoning behind asking users to carry around a notice? Why not just let users go without it? Is it for legal reasons or for crediting the authors? I’ve released MIT licensed software before and frankly when someone is using my code, I really don’t care about credit or leaving behind a legacy or such things.
- ghaff 6y agoUnderstanding the license in use and the permissions associated with it are important in many contexts. In fact, the MIT license was created in the first place because there were issues associated with just releasing X Windows into the public domain.
- sidpatil 6y agoThis line confused me for a while, because it looked like a copyleft provision to me.
- CameronNemo 6y agoIs requiring attribution copyleft? I thought copyleft implied needing to make source code available.
- TwoPizza9612536 6y agoJust needing attribution is not copyleft, you are giving credit to the original author. Share-Alike or using the same license to make source code available like GPL is copyleft.
- systemvoltage 6y agoIt's not copy left, but users have the right to see the license "tree" if you will of all the things you've built your code with. I think, as others have pointed out in the replies, 0BSD or MIT-0 is more suitable for me.
- xixixao 6y agoI was hoping for a discussion of the “substantial portions” term. The explanation focuses on use as a dependency, but what if I take some MIT code and modify it and include it directly in my project? What counts as “substantial portion”?
- torstenvl 6y agoIn general it means "this applies to derivative works." At best, it might provide an argument that APIs aren't covered (now that that's a thing). But copyright law doesn't really recognize "substantial portion" as a term of art (though it's arguably related to one of the prongs of a Fair Use inquiry). IANYL but my personal practice is and would be to ignore the word "substantial."
- CameronNemo 6y agoSo if I copy a 3 line example off stackoverflow I may need to add a license disclaimer... Wow.
- greggyb 6y agoIt depends on SO's terms of use. Without any terms to the contrary, which I am confident exist, you would be violating copyright by copying that example, regardless of attribution. Assuming the example is the original work of the author of the post (and again, assuming no other terms), then that post author would hold copyright to the work. You would have no license to copy or distribute it. I have great confidence that SO's terms include a section wherein contributors grant license or grant copyright to SO. At that point (again, assuming no other terms), you would still have no right or license to copy or distribute the work. Assuming SO has a very permissive license to the work, including the ability to re-license it, they can grant you a license to copy or distribute the work. At that point you are bound by the terms of the license SO grants you. Read the terms to get specifics.
- njharman 6y agoRead the SO TOS. Probably can't legally include that unless SO gives you license. Thanks to the 197? Law that provided automatic copyright the instant anyone says or does anything copyrightable. I'm sure SO TOS states by using this site you assign or grant copyrights to SO. Same as HN and any site otherwise they'd be liable for reproducing what I wrote in this comment which in USA is automatically copyrighted to me the moment I hit "reply".
- tacitusarc 6y ago> The implied warranty of “merchantability” under UCC section 2-314 is a promise that “the goods”—the Software—are of at least average quality, properly packaged and labeled, and fit for the ordinary purposes they are intended to serve. So, all goods have an implied warranty requiring they must be of at least average quality? How does that work? Does average have a different meeting in a legal context?
- martincmartin 6y agoSuppose I sell you an oil filter for your 2019 Mazda. When you get it home, you realize there's a big hole in it, and it can't be used to replace the one currently on your car. You call me up and I say "I never said it would work in a car, I just said it was an oil filter (true) which would fit into a 2019 Mazda (true)." The law says "nice try, you can't be that pedantic. The ordinary purpose of oil filters it to actually filter oil in a car, so when you sold it, there was an understanding that it would work for that purpose."
- fogof 6y agoWhat if the oil filter doesn't have a hole in it, but just has 10,000 miles on it so it doesn't work well anymore. Would selling that be ok? What about a filter with 9,000 miles, or 5,000 miles, or 1,000 miles? Who decides what the cutoff is?
- detaro 6y ago> Who decides what the cutoff is? ultimately, a judge.
- owenmarshall 6y agoThis is where technical people hit a wall with the law. Many legal systems, especially the American one, aren’t based on strict enumerable lists of what my lawyer friends would call “bright line tests”. This is probably a good thing, all in all.
- torstenvl 6y agoGreat article, similar to a blog post I did recently. This is a minor nitpick and shouldn't be read as an overall criticism of the author or this post, which is better than the one I did. However, I will note that non-infringement and title are, in fact, implied warranties in the UCC. I'm not sure why the author missed it. https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-312 https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-312
- dctoedt 6y agoMinor correction: Under UCC § 2-312(3) (link in parent), non-infringement is an implied warranty only if the seller is a "merchant," i.e., one who regularly deals in goods of the kind. The implied warranty of noninfringement can be disclaimed under § 2-316, and vendors almost universally do so (preferring to make specific express warranties instead when they perceive a market need). https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-316 https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-316
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kemitchell 6y agoHiya, DC. Glad to see your name here. :-D The UCC nerds are out in force this round!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thed 6y agoThis article touches a point I have been wondering about regarding the Notice condition: "But web developers, as a whole, haven’t got the memo.". The JavaScript and npm ecosystem are extremely dependency-heavy. Even if you only take a few yourself, the number of sub-dependencies of even a simple application are often in the hundreds. Why does "everyone" ignore the attribution of their dependencies and sub-dependencies? Laziness? Risk of getting sued too low? What happens if Oracle buys all the left-pads in the world?
- torstenvl 6y agoI'm not following your train of thought here really. Are you saying that people are stripping out the notice from the source code as a matter of course and then redistributing it?
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoIs that minification?
- cyral 6y agoI thought minifiers were supposed to keep licenses (they can detect the license header). I suppose this could get turned off or messed up by accident with the gigantic custom webpack bundlers even stuff like create-react-app ship with.
- nicoburns 6y agoLots of libraries don't put the license in the header, only in a separate LICENSE file.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoI've looked at Webpack's output before, and I don't recall seeing any headers there.
- 6y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThat was nicely done! I am glad to see an actual IP lawyer's view on this thing.
- paxys 6y ago> 171 words every programmer should understand Except there really isn't any agreement on some of the finer details of the license, no matter how much you want to study and understand it. Does the license text have to be included in only the source code or the compiled software? What if the source code of the derived software isn't made public? What is "substantial portions" of the software? Can a MIT project be relicensed? What is the point of any of these clauses then? While it is a great license, I wish something closer to just public domain would have become the OSS default, since that is what 99% of developers want anyways.
- kemitchell 6y agoI was involved with a group of open licensing lawyers that ended up publishing a "model" permissive license: https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 It's not everything anyone ever wanted, but we think it's a lot closer.
- rectang 6y agoI like the way this license is much clearer about rights and obligations. From the standpoint of software developers being able to grok it, it looks like a strong improvement on the MIT and BSD families. If you are serious about adoption, I suggest providing an official header to embed in files. Something simple like this: // Licensed under https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 Also "instructions on how to use this license in your software project" would be helpful. (Paste the text of the license into a file named "LICENSE", "LICENSE.md", or similar. Add the header as a comment to every file...)
- kemitchell 6y agoThanks. We didn't originally set out to write a new license, but when we did, we put real time and thought into it. It's nice to see that appreciated. We've shied away from declaring one "right" way to use the license, because norms, conventions, and expectations vary so much across development communities. What's right and normal for, say, Maven artifacts would seem a bit strange in, say, an npm package or a C library.
- tomcam 6y agoUntil 5 minutes ago, I thought myself pretty copyright-savvy. I've spent perhaps $200,000 on IP attorneys over the last couple of decades--far more than most HNers, far less than many others. I also follow IP law loosely because it interests me. Turns out I'm still a tyro.
- kemitchell 6y agoFor what it's worth, the author of the post has a lot to learn, too.
- 7402 6y agoAside from my enjoyment of the subtle humor expressed in the above comment, I find it interesting that there was no way to express either approval or disapproval of it without that action being subject to misinterpretation. I sat frozen for two minutes, mouse poised above the up and down triangles, unable to act. An appreciative reply seemed to be the only way out. Bravo.
- grae_euler 6y agoDoes anyone know of a similar breakdown for licences like GPL v2 and the like? It's a part of programming I feel like I should know more about but never took the time to look at.
- qwertygnu 6y agoLinked on the first line of the article: https://writing.kemitchell.com/series/line-by-line.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/series/line-by-line.html
- jedimastert 6y agoContains a post about the AGPL, which specifically does not go into detail about the GPL but just the difference between them. Not super helpful
- ignoramous 6y agoNeeds a new edition but comprehensive enough for GPLv2: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/understanding-open-source/0596005814/ch03.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/understanding-open-sour...
- stephen82 6y agoThere you go http://richardbestlaw.com/download/734/ http://richardbestlaw.com/download/734/ It's called "A Practical Guide to WordPress and the GPL" and I must admit, it's easy to understand.
- eeZah7Ux 6y agohttps://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice...
- smlckz 6y agoWhy is there ''and/or'' in the MIT license text? Why is it needed? Does the phrase ''this permission notice'' cover the following disclaimer? Also, what is the shortest possible license that is functionally equivalent to the MIT license? The shortest ''license'' I've ever seen is this: https://git.suckless.org/dmenu/file/arg.h.html https://git.suckless.org/dmenu/file/arg.h.html /* * Copy me if you can. * by 20h */ Is this really a license? What about the SQLite blessing?
- lytedev 6y agoProbably to clarify against exclusive or?
- TwoPizza9612536 6y agoThe "and" means include and the "or" means optional. It needed because it basically states your rights on what you can do with the software and means you can distribute if you choose to distribute the software, it your choice or right to distribute the software (from the MIT License). The phrase "this permission notice" also cover the "NO WARRANTY" disclaimer for the software because you will have to include the license if you use it in another software but you can provide warranty under a close source license or your license states you will provide warranties. The "copyright notice" and "this permission notice" means the license. The shortest possible license that is functionally equivalent to the MIT license is the ISC license, it was created to remove language that is not needed. Read the Wikipedia article here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license. I do not know other licenses than this. Technically it is a license but do not use it and it is just probably a joke. The SQL Blessing is technically probably a Public Domain waver. This is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer.
- torstenvl 6y agoI use a minimal version of the ISC/OpenBSD license. - I don't know of anything in the Berne Convention or Title 17, U.S. Code, that would require the phrase "with or without fee" so I remove it. - I use "work" instead of "software." There's no reason to be over-specific. - I treat the entire text as one notice, rather than specifying each paragraph separately. Copyright (c) 2021, MyOrganization THIS WORK IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITH NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES. THERE IS NO WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR TITLE. NO AUTHOR SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATING TO USE OF THIS WORK. Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this work for any purpose is hereby granted, provided this notice appears in all copies.
- SeanLuke 6y ago> Lastly, as a result of this mishmash of legal, industry, general-intellectual-property, and general-use terms, it isn’t clear whether The MIT License includes a patent license. The general language “deal in” and some of the example verbs, especially “use”, point toward a patent license, albeit a very unclear one. I think this is a very carefully couched way of saying "the MIT license doesn't protect the licensee from being sued by the licensor for patent violation." If person A has a patent on algorithm X, and he wrote open source code which implements X, and he licenses this code to person B under the MIT (or BSD) license, and B uses the code, it's feasible for A to sue B for patent violation. For this reason alone, I think MIT and BSD are awful, archaic licenses that should be avoided at all costs. The Apache 2.0 license is a great substitute.
- kemitchell 6y agoOther very capable analysts have argued that MIT does grant patent rights, either express or implied. They've also argued that other legal rules, especially patent "exhaustion", remove the risk. I'm with you on this, though. It doesn't have to be broke. We can fix it. Blue Oak Council, a nonprofit I'm a part of, published a tier-ranked list of permissive licenses. All of those at the top handle patent explicitly: https://blueoakcouncil.org/list https://blueoakcouncil.org/list We also published a model permissive license, which comes with a very explicit, very broad patent grant: https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0
- lanius 6y agoI did not realize the MIT License had so many variants [1]. Compare that to Apache License 2.0, which has one canonical form [2]. For this reason alone, Apache seems like a plainly better choice (IANAL). [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:MIT https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:MIT [2] http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0