The MIT license was written in the late 1980s. It was typical for software to be distributed in physical media (floppy disks, and, later, CD-ROMs) through bric

The MIT license was written in the late 1980s. It was typical for software to be distributed in physical media (floppy disks, and, later, CD-ROMs) through brick-and-mortar retail stores. It was not uncommon for someone to sell physical media with otherwise-free software, and so it was desirable to make end-users aware that the software was available for free. The GPL's "accompany it with a written offer... of the corresponding source code" is also an interesting holdover from this era (nowadays everyone just distributes source over the Internet, instead of sending checks and CDs through the mail). Copyright notices were also typically visible when you first started a program in the 80s and 90s. These were relegated to "about" menus when it became the norm to "design a launch screen that’s nearly identical to the first screen of your app" to make apps feel faster.