16 ms·

MIT-0 License

226 points by rudedogg 5y ago

mlyle 5y ago
One issue with this is that there's no obligation to keep the license on it-- which means that the entire disclaimer and lack of warranty can get sheared off the software. Then in turn downstream users can legitimately obtain it without knowing that you're attempting to disclaim liability.
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  I think that's not really an issue for the intended use case: "code that is intended for developers to use as reference, teaching samples, examples, or templates that other developers may modify for their own purposes." Consider some libfoo, and in libfoo you include example.mylang as a "quickstart" for the common use case, and many people use this as a starting point, modifying it a bit to suit their needs but not much. Technically you should attribute this file/function/class too, but in practice no one does, and no one really cares either. I've had people ask me to put a license on 2-line Stack Overflow licenses (it's already CC-BY, but people still ask for some reason, I guess to comply with company legal dept.) It's useful for stuff like that: you typically don't really care what someone does with your fairly simple examples/demos/etc. (which may not even meet the threshold of originality to apply for copyright protection) and whether they attribute it.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    But isn't a demo or example code exactly the kind of thing one might want to disclaim liability for?
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      Consider that code without any license at all, or even explicitly public domain. There is no implied liability at all. It carries as much legal risk as leaving a photocopied Anarchist Cookbook in your sock drawer.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - yissp 5y ago
        If that's really the case, why does pretty much every software license feel the need to include a liability disclaimer? Genuine question, I've often wondered about this.
        eyelidlessness 5y ago
        I suspect it has more power to prevent litigation (and disputes more generally) than to win anything? It’s also entirely possible it’s just [a much less derisive term than “cargo cult” which eludes me at the moment].
        ghaff 5y ago
        Pro forma is probably the term you’re looking for.
        eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Oh wow that is the term I was looking for! Thank you.
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      Think even more trivial than a demo or an example -- think more along the lines of a "skeleton" project. Something that isn't even a runnable example yet, just the outline of where someone else's code will go. Whether something like this is even copyrightable is questionable. But releasing it under a license like MIT-0 removes any ambiguity -- whether it's copyrightable or not, the original author is allowing you to use it for anything at all, no strings attached.
- paxys 5y ago
  Sure, but the burden of liability falls on the one who relicensed your work and removed the disclaimer.
mattl 5y ago
Don’t call this the MIT license. That’s attribution to a real place. At least call it the Expat-0 license!
- ProAm 5y ago
  It's not the first time amazon took something from someone else, repackaged it and sold it as their own. AmazonBasics-0
  - adolph 5y ago
    Maybe OpenMIT-0 license, then OpenLicence-0 license (N. America) and OpenLicense-0 license (Atlantic East trademark zone)
  - sixstringtheory 5y ago
    You joke but I was legitimately wondering why they didn’t just call it the AWS license.
    - CSSer 5y ago
      I’m just spit balling here, but it sounds like problematic brand association to me. I could see how someone might think that would mean any code written by or for AWS uses this license. Maybe in MIT’s case that’s not as problematic? But tbh, I’m on my phone atm and I don’t know much about the MIT license’s history or origin. Are most developers bad at licenses? I’m feeling pretty naïve right now.
      - giancarlostoro 5y ago
        Anecdotal but the majority of developers I run into have no true understanding of a majority of software licenses, if any at all. In my younger years I sat down with a developer who did know and got a summary about literally every license I could think of, and its still stuck in my head since. I feel like colleges should really cover them in some capacity with examples of lawsuits related to licensing disputes.
- 5y ago
hgs3 5y ago
Seems identical to the Zero-Clause BSD.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license
- creatonez 5y ago
  I believe it is. Note that 0BSD is not related to the other BSD licenses, but is rather textually derived from the ISC license. The ISC license is pretty much just "what if we took MIT, and removed all the text that is already implied in most jurisdictions?" So 0BSD is to MIT-0 as ISC is to MIT. Just a less verbose alternative.
- ghaff 5y ago
  There’s also been the unlicense fairly recently. They’re all intended as lightweight ways to effectively put something into the public domain—to the degree you can in a given jurisdiction.
  - creatonez 5y ago
    Unlicense is known to have problems in some jurisdictions. There was a discussion about this on the OSI mailing listing years ago. StackExchange answer summarizing the OSI mailing listing discussion - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/147111/what-is-wrong-with-the-unlicense/147120#147120 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1471... The discussion itself - https://web.archive.org/web/20170301020915/https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/001386.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170301020915/https://lists.ope...
    - ghaff 5y ago
      And there’s also the anti-copyright ideological baggage associated with unlicense. To round it out there’s also CC0 but OSI objected to the explicit lack of patent grant language even though patent grants are often assumed.
awinter-py 5y ago
'missing the middle of the sandwich' is the best thing in here and I hope it becomes a one-liner for this kind of behavior
xiphias2 5y ago
I was first thinking that MIT came out with a modified version of its own license. This is more like work for for free for Amazon license.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Some people do want to simply put their work into the public domain to the degree they can. Personally a permissive license probably makes more sense but I appreciate someone saying they don’t want to have anything to do with this copyright stuff.
  - rectang 5y ago
    I have used CC0 for code that I would like people to be able to use in code licensed however they choose, without having to bother with attribution. Sample code, for instance. If they're being responsible, they only have to note the provenance of the code in version control. After that, they can basically treat it like their own.
- paxys 5y ago
  The MIT license isn't owned or managed by MIT in any capacity. The name was given to it many decades ago (since it is derived from a bunch of licenses used by MIT at the time) and it just stuck.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  > This is more like work for for free for Amazon license Pretty much any open source license would be that, the main difference this one provides is that Amazon wont even have to acknowledge you worked for them for free :-P
idealmedtech 5y ago
[Disclaimer: not a lawyer, this is not legal advice] I understand they're trying to get rid of cascading attribution requirements for enterprise (which is part of the reason NIH syndrome became so prevalent!), BUT I really dislike this incarnation for two primary reasons: 1. It has conflicting branding. How is a newbie gonna know the difference? How many will misclick it because it sorts first, or because they don't know it's different than true MIT? 2. Some users may read 0 suffix as "original", "optimal", or "first" (0-index), further polluting the branding. If they rereleased under another name these problems would be alleviated, but I don't think their intentions are entirely altruistic here.
- paxys 5y ago
  Releasing under a different name would have the opposite problem. No one would use it because they wouldn't know that it was the MIT license with the attribution condition removed, even if that was exactly what they were looking for. The 0- convention is also somewhat standard for this category of licenses (like 0BSD).
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Not a problem in actual practice, derivative licenses are commonly identified as such and their slight differences are much easier to explain than the whole of any one original license.
    - idealmedtech 5y ago
      See: AGPL, LGPL for very popular examples of such modifications
      - Jenk 5y ago
        Neither of which use -0 suffix, however, which I believe to be GGGP's point.
      - giancarlostoro 5y ago
simfree 5y ago
Didn't realize Mark decided to do this after leaving HP Enterprise, but crazy that it took 4 years to get published by Amazon. For an open source evangelist, this is an odd way to engage the community. Really makes the FSF's principles look good, with the four freedoms and such.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Realize that this is not new. It went through the OSI approval process and was approved maybe 2+ years? Ago.
- cowsandmilk 5y ago
  It took less than a year of him being at Amazon to get published. It took four years for this hacker news thread to happen.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
Isn’t this effectively the same as WTFPL? Of course I’m not a lawyer but they both seem to have total overlap in purpose and effect. The disclaiming aspects of MIT are basically restating defaults anywhere they’re legally enforceable.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  In spirit, yes. In practice, the wording is much more legally problematic in the WTFPL. And licenses such as MIT-0 or 0BSD contain liability waivers that are not present in the WTFPL
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Is there actual in practice case law distinguishing them? I mean this question sincerely despite my skepticism.
    - rectang 5y ago
      There are tangible costs to crayon licenses, long before cases reach court. The more convoluted and amateurish the drafting, the more unclear the meaning and the more that lawyers make advising clients what to do about them. Sticking it to users who care about compliance is part of the appeal of licenses like the WTFPL, but it's ironic that the money flows to lawyers. When the ASF finally banned the JSON license for use in dependencies, the legal cost of figuring out compliance was one of the motivations cited by the people who proposed the ban.
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        Some people think that a short and simple license keeps lawyers away. It's the very opposite. There's a good reason why GPL and contracts for renting an apartment, buying a car etc are so long: it's to reduce ambiguity.
        eyelidlessness 5y ago
orasis 5y ago
What license is the MIT license itself released under? Can licenses be copied and modified willy-nilly or do you need to license a license?
- paxys 5y ago
  That's a great question. The short answer – no one knows. Technically someone does own the copyright to these words, and if they are able to prove it they could sue every project that uses or refers to it, which is a troubling thought. That is very unlikely to happen, however, since the license originated at MIT (as the name suggests) and the current version is the result of a lot of iteration and modification done by many people over many decades.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    And trademark probably plays in too IANAL. I assume coming up with your own Creative Commons license unrelated to that organization would be problematic.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > Technically someone does own the copyright to these words, and if they are able to prove it they could sue every project that uses or refers to it, which is a troubling thought. That seems unlikely to be true. Recipes can't be copyrighted because they're functional. Legal licenses are also functional. (What's that? You think source code is functional? Shows what you know.)
- 1f60c 5y ago
  No, the licenses themselves are protected by copyright as well. But the only license I can think of that explicitly states this fact is GPLv3, which begins: Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <https://fsf.org/> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
- mike97 5y ago
  Ksksjzkzjssjsjksssjsjjsjszjff
armchairhacker 5y ago
The MIT-2 License: Like the MIT license but you must put 2 instances somewhere in your attribution. It is per-license, so the whoever includes your work in their own project must put 4 instances, and so on.
- paxys 5y ago
  How quickly would the count of MIT-2 license files in your node_modules folder exceed the number of atoms in the universe?
  - sgc 5y ago
    If your server crashes counting the MIT-2 license files, do they satisfy the requirements?
  - idealmedtech 5y ago
    Approximately 240 sub licenses deep (2^3 ~ 10, 10^80 atoms in observable universe)
    - paxys 5y ago
      That's only for the case where project A depends on project B which depends on project C which depends on project D...240 projects deep. But what if each of them has more than 1 dependency? Also you'd have to sum up the entire series, since the licenses at every level are included in the folder, not just the top-level one.
      - idealmedtech 5y ago
        ~~Yes, in my head I was considering all of those to be, in their total, the "sublicenses." Should have been better worded; but a total of 240 distinct MIT licensed dependencies in a project is the number at which MIT-2 would run out of atoms to print on.~~ Nevermind, I see your point! In reality it would be something relating to N sums of 2^k, k being highest depth dependency for each of the N projects. Obviously we're talking bounds and not exact calculations here.
_Marak_ 5y ago
GNU Affero General Public License https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
needle0 5y ago
So MIT is "do attribute me" and I guess MIT-0 is "you don't need to attribute me (but it's fine if you do)", I wonder if there are any "explicitly do NOT attribute me" licenses?
- gxnxcxcx 5y ago
  Alan Smithee learns to code.
- oefrha 5y ago
  And guess what, there are very good reasons to use a do NOT attribute me license: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    You built a formula 1 race car and tossed the keys to kids with ego problems. Now i have to deal with Win10 0-days because this garbage. Never before have I been so motivated to write open source software.
fartcannon 5y ago
I predict a wave of articles and blog posts about how open source doesn't work in about 5 years, after the new generation of developers that Amazon convinces to use this licence complete the process of being out competed by Amazon using their own IP.
- ilammy 5y ago
  Now, without even a line of attribution whatsoever in a LICENSE file somewhere in the project.
- CSSer 5y ago
  I mean, I’m already pretty cynical about open source. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t work, but I think that many open source projects, or at least many of the ones in the fairly juvenile domain in which I operate, have intentions thinly veiled by the guise of corporate altruism.
- cowsandmilk 5y ago
  Love that a 4 year old commit in a repo can cause people to come up with conspiracy theories just because it is AWS.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    And I love corporate apologists!
lobo_tuerto 5y ago
Why not use the referenced MIT-Zero license instead?
zeta0134 5y ago
I use this license for a few of my NES libraries, since they're meant to be used in homebrew games where memory is a real problem. 32kB of PRG ROM (and the associated 8k of CHR ROM) doesn't leave much extra room for text rendering systems or fonts, and every byte counts. Sure if there's room, attribute away, but for simpler games there's really no need. It's fine :)
bloaf 5y ago
Now I want a MIT--1 license that prohibits attributing the code to the author in any way, including in legal filings, and then you don't need any other part of the license.
skissane 5y ago
IANAL, but assuming a jurisdiction in which public domain dedications are likely to be legally valid (such as the US), is there any real difference between this license and a public domain dedication? Isn’t this functionally equivalent to the public domain, even if it is technically not? Public domain code, I can do whatever I want with it, even publish it with all indications of its origins removed. Legally fine. But it seems like the same thing here-for a downstream consumer at least. From the original developer’s viewpoint - the warranty disclaimer may give some additional legal protection, but you can put a warranty disclaimer in a public domain dedication too. People will debate whether warranty disclaimers in public domain dedications have the same legal force as those in copyright licenses-but maybe that too is a theoretical debate, because how big is the risk of someone being successfully sued by a code reuser who has zero commercial relationship (support or consulting contracts, etc) with the original developer-has that ever actually happened? Or are all these warranty disclaimers just lawyers saying “it’s never happened, but we can’t totally rule out the remote possibility that one day it might, so let’s just include some legalese to improve our position if anyone ever tries to make it happen - a disclaimer doesn’t cost anything significant anyway”?
- nickelpro 5y ago
  Prior work in the public domain can have implications for future licensed work derived from the public domain work. Releasing under an extremely permissive license does not relinquish copyright. Any future derived work by the author would still be unambiguously licensable under any conditions they see fit.
  - skissane 5y ago
    > Prior work in the public domain can have implications for future licensed work derived from the public domain work. Isn't that just the normal case of a derived work? If you modify a public domain work, you don't have copyright on the parts which are identical to the public domain original, but you do have it on any non-trivial modifications/additions, and you can license the later (whether under an open source or proprietary license). A real world example is the Ghidra reverse engineering suite - it was originally written by US government employees in the course of their employment, and as such that original code is ineligible for copyright in the United States and automatically in the public domain in the US (although its legal status in non-US jurisdictions is rather more complex, variable, and at times even unsettled), and hence cannot be released under an open source license (or any other copyright license for that matter). But, they also accept outside contributions, which generally would be under copyright (whether by the contributor or their employer), and it is a condition of accepting those contributions that the contributor agrees to license them under the Apache 2 license. Hence, Ghidra is an amalgam of public domain code (or at least, public domain in the US) and copyrighted code licensed under Apache 2. I'm not aware this causes any problems in practice.
nickelpro 5y ago
I prefer zlib over this. If you're shipping my code in a binary I don't care about attribution, but if you're reproducing my entire repo in source code form don't claim that you wrote it
- Tepix 5y ago
  That's not what this license is for. It's for teaching where the attribution would be a nuisance.
  - pas 5y ago
    wat!? I mean... yes it would, but isn't teaching proper care and attention of licensing important? If it's not the developer's original code then they ought to think at least a few minutes about where it came from and whether they have consent to use it and all that nuisance.
    - ldjb 5y ago
      From the Rationale section: This license has proven useful for code that is intended for developers to use as reference, teaching samples, examples, or templates that other developers may modify for their own purposes. I don't think teaching proper care and attention of licensing is incompatible with wanting to release teaching materials under a licence that does not require attribution.
      - mhitza 5y ago
        How is this license different/better than Creative Commons Zero (CC0)? When I think of written content, I always think&go for a CC license.
        freemint 5y ago
        There is some general FUD for using CC licenses for code. The CC0 works for code but is a lot more complicated then 0BSD.
jayp1418 5y ago
I think NetBSD licensing is best : http://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html http://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html
raggi 5y ago
What happens once there are layers of execution of the lack of attribution, but then someone downstream comes into a battle over provenance? They have to backtrack now even more poorly documented provenance in discovery? Sounds awful.
LugarOS 5y ago
At that point just go fully PD or CC0. Why have some random license nobody has heard of or wants to read about when you can just slap a CC0 sticker on it.
- boyter 5y ago
  If you are Australian or German public domain is not an option.
  - notRobot 5y ago
    Hence CC0.
vasco 5y ago
> i.e., a license is preferable to a public domain dedication Are we that easy to fool by lawyers? The public domain is the public domain. Before someone comes out and says that the concept of dedicating IP to the public domain doesn't exist in some countries or is full of hidden perils, I'll ask you to provide a single case where code was attributed to the public domain and that became a problem for the author or for the users.
- Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
  > The public domain is the public domain “I place this in the public domain” has a significantly different meaning in British English.
  - bicolao 5y ago
    What does it mean in British English?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
      It relates to availability, not copyright. “Not secret” instead of “not copyrighted”. So if you say “the facts are in the public domain” in BrE, that might mean that they’ve been published in a newspaper. It doesn’t mean anything about their copyright status.
      - feeela 5y ago
        Still, in any other sane country on this planet, works in the public domain are to be used however one want's to.
mort96 5y ago
Is... Is Amazon allowed to just use the name "MIT" for its own unrelated license? Doesn't MIT have some say over the use of the name "MIT"? Can I make my own license and call it MIT-2, to make my license sound much more established and prestigious than it really is? Or is this a case of "it's OK because Amazon does it and nobody will sue them for it"?
- deadbeeves 5y ago
  I would think the only way they could be stopped is if "MIT" is a registered trademark. No idea if it is. But actually, would trademarks even apply in legal documents? A software license is not a product nor a business and there's no chance of confusing it with one, so could I publish a Disney™ Public License?
  - intunderflow 5y ago
    It is a trademark - https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73797219&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73797219&caseType=SERIAL_...
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    What makes you think that software licenses are not products? Licenses like the GPL or to a lesser degree the Apache 2.0 are products that took a lot of effort to produce and are marketed just like other products. And I wouldn't be surprised if lots of EULAs are basically the same license sold by some lawyer or consultant to multiple companies. Software licenses don't just fall from the heaven and get adopted on their own.
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  > Is... Is Amazon allowed to just use the name "MIT" for its own unrelated license? Absolutely not.
d0ublespeak 5y ago
Imagine AWS wanting to get rid of attribution. Sounds like something that isn’t the slightest bit disingenuous.
conaclos 5y ago
For interested readers: you can find a quick comparison of licenses at https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ MIT No Attribution is included in the comparison.
codeflo 5y ago
Oh for the love of God, don’t introduce confusingly named variants of widely known licenses. If a new license is really needed — fine, if lawyers think that’s necessary, it probably is — but don’t name it that. No one will bother to check whether MIT and MIT-7BZ3/2 are slightly incompatible.
- rafaelturk 5y ago
maydup-nem 5y ago
no, thanks, i will stick with gpl
- maydup-nem 5y ago
  the pure satisfaction of getting downvoted by corposhills is immeasurable
Scorpiion 5y ago
FYI this is from 2018. I thought it was something released recently but saw on Github that it's from 2018.
johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago
This is an amazing effort from Amazon. I've noticed Amazon has always been a very developer friendly company.
- cryptica 5y ago
  Is this sarcasm? This license is horrible for developers. Attribution is literally the only thing they get out of open source. Any open source developer who uses this license could not possibly be using it out of their own free will.
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
This license was not released by MIT, and should not carry its name
clock99 5y ago
ram_rar 5y ago
Isn't MIT trademarked [1] ? Can anyone take a trademarked name for a license? [1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73797219&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73797219&caseType=SERIAL_...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
feeela 5y ago
> a license is preferable to a public domain dedication Who says that and why? Why should I care about the complicated terms of a license - especially when such a license expresses essentially the same as "public domain"? Or in other words: is there any real rationale behind the above statement?

226 points by rudedogg 5y ago

One issue with this is that there's no obligation to keep the license on it-- which means that the entire disclaimer and lack of warranty can get sheared off the software. Then in turn downstream users can legitimately obtain it without knowing that you're attempting to disclaim liability.

Beltalowda 5y ago
I think that's not really an issue for the intended use case: "code that is intended for developers to use as reference, teaching samples, examples, or templates that other developers may modify for their own purposes." Consider some libfoo, and in libfoo you include example.mylang as a "quickstart" for the common use case, and many people use this as a starting point, modifying it a bit to suit their needs but not much. Technically you should attribute this file/function/class too, but in practice no one does, and no one really cares either. I've had people ask me to put a license on 2-line Stack Overflow licenses (it's already CC-BY, but people still ask for some reason, I guess to comply with company legal dept.) It's useful for stuff like that: you typically don't really care what someone does with your fairly simple examples/demos/etc. (which may not even meet the threshold of originality to apply for copyright protection) and whether they attribute it.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  But isn't a demo or example code exactly the kind of thing one might want to disclaim liability for?
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Consider that code without any license at all, or even explicitly public domain. There is no implied liability at all. It carries as much legal risk as leaving a photocopied Anarchist Cookbook in your sock drawer.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - yissp 5y ago
      If that's really the case, why does pretty much every software license feel the need to include a liability disclaimer? Genuine question, I've often wondered about this.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        I suspect it has more power to prevent litigation (and disputes more generally) than to win anything? It’s also entirely possible it’s just [a much less derisive term than “cargo cult” which eludes me at the moment].
        ghaff 5y ago
        Pro forma is probably the term you’re looking for.
        eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Oh wow that is the term I was looking for! Thank you.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Think even more trivial than a demo or an example -- think more along the lines of a "skeleton" project. Something that isn't even a runnable example yet, just the outline of where someone else's code will go. Whether something like this is even copyrightable is questionable. But releasing it under a license like MIT-0 removes any ambiguity -- whether it's copyrightable or not, the original author is allowing you to use it for anything at all, no strings attached.
paxys 5y ago
Sure, but the burden of liability falls on the one who relicensed your work and removed the disclaimer.

mattl 5y ago

Don’t call this the MIT license. That’s attribution to a real place. At least call it the Expat-0 license!

ProAm 5y ago
It's not the first time amazon took something from someone else, repackaged it and sold it as their own. AmazonBasics-0
- adolph 5y ago
  Maybe OpenMIT-0 license, then OpenLicence-0 license (N. America) and OpenLicense-0 license (Atlantic East trademark zone)
- sixstringtheory 5y ago
  You joke but I was legitimately wondering why they didn’t just call it the AWS license.
  - CSSer 5y ago
    I’m just spit balling here, but it sounds like problematic brand association to me. I could see how someone might think that would mean any code written by or for AWS uses this license. Maybe in MIT’s case that’s not as problematic? But tbh, I’m on my phone atm and I don’t know much about the MIT license’s history or origin. Are most developers bad at licenses? I’m feeling pretty naïve right now.
    - giancarlostoro 5y ago
      Anecdotal but the majority of developers I run into have no true understanding of a majority of software licenses, if any at all. In my younger years I sat down with a developer who did know and got a summary about literally every license I could think of, and its still stuck in my head since. I feel like colleges should really cover them in some capacity with examples of lawsuits related to licensing disputes.
5y ago

hgs3 5y ago

Seems identical to the Zero-Clause BSD.

throw0101a 5y ago
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#0-clause * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license
creatonez 5y ago
I believe it is. Note that 0BSD is not related to the other BSD licenses, but is rather textually derived from the ISC license. The ISC license is pretty much just "what if we took MIT, and removed all the text that is already implied in most jurisdictions?" So 0BSD is to MIT-0 as ISC is to MIT. Just a less verbose alternative.
ghaff 5y ago
There’s also been the unlicense fairly recently. They’re all intended as lightweight ways to effectively put something into the public domain—to the degree you can in a given jurisdiction.
- creatonez 5y ago
  Unlicense is known to have problems in some jurisdictions. There was a discussion about this on the OSI mailing listing years ago. StackExchange answer summarizing the OSI mailing listing discussion - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/147111/what-is-wrong-with-the-unlicense/147120#147120 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1471... The discussion itself - https://web.archive.org/web/20170301020915/https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2012-January/001386.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170301020915/https://lists.ope...
  - ghaff 5y ago
    And there’s also the anti-copyright ideological baggage associated with unlicense. To round it out there’s also CC0 but OSI objected to the explicit lack of patent grant language even though patent grants are often assumed.

awinter-py 5y ago

'missing the middle of the sandwich' is the best thing in here and I hope it becomes a one-liner for this kind of behavior

xiphias2 5y ago

I was first thinking that MIT came out with a modified version of its own license. This is more like work for for free for Amazon license.

ghaff 5y ago
Some people do want to simply put their work into the public domain to the degree they can. Personally a permissive license probably makes more sense but I appreciate someone saying they don’t want to have anything to do with this copyright stuff.
- rectang 5y ago
  I have used CC0 for code that I would like people to be able to use in code licensed however they choose, without having to bother with attribution. Sample code, for instance. If they're being responsible, they only have to note the provenance of the code in version control. After that, they can basically treat it like their own.
paxys 5y ago
The MIT license isn't owned or managed by MIT in any capacity. The name was given to it many decades ago (since it is derived from a bunch of licenses used by MIT at the time) and it just stuck.
badsectoracula 5y ago
> This is more like work for for free for Amazon license Pretty much any open source license would be that, the main difference this one provides is that Amazon wont even have to acknowledge you worked for them for free :-P

idealmedtech 5y ago

[Disclaimer: not a lawyer, this is not legal advice] I understand they're trying to get rid of cascading attribution requirements for enterprise (which is part of the reason NIH syndrome became so prevalent!), BUT I really dislike this incarnation for two primary reasons: 1. It has conflicting branding. How is a newbie gonna know the difference? How many will misclick it because it sorts first, or because they don't know it's different than true MIT? 2. Some users may read 0 suffix as "original", "optimal", or "first" (0-index), further polluting the branding. If they rereleased under another name these problems would be alleviated, but I don't think their intentions are entirely altruistic here.

paxys 5y ago
Releasing under a different name would have the opposite problem. No one would use it because they wouldn't know that it was the MIT license with the attribution condition removed, even if that was exactly what they were looking for. The 0- convention is also somewhat standard for this category of licenses (like 0BSD).
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Not a problem in actual practice, derivative licenses are commonly identified as such and their slight differences are much easier to explain than the whole of any one original license.
  - idealmedtech 5y ago
    See: AGPL, LGPL for very popular examples of such modifications
    - Jenk 5y ago
      Neither of which use -0 suffix, however, which I believe to be GGGP's point.
    - giancarlostoro 5y ago

simfree 5y ago

Didn't realize Mark decided to do this after leaving HP Enterprise, but crazy that it took 4 years to get published by Amazon. For an open source evangelist, this is an odd way to engage the community. Really makes the FSF's principles look good, with the four freedoms and such.

ghaff 5y ago
Realize that this is not new. It went through the OSI approval process and was approved maybe 2+ years? Ago.
cowsandmilk 5y ago
It took less than a year of him being at Amazon to get published. It took four years for this hacker news thread to happen.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

Isn’t this effectively the same as WTFPL? Of course I’m not a lawyer but they both seem to have total overlap in purpose and effect. The disclaiming aspects of MIT are basically restating defaults anywhere they’re legally enforceable.

CameronNemo 5y ago
In spirit, yes. In practice, the wording is much more legally problematic in the WTFPL. And licenses such as MIT-0 or 0BSD contain liability waivers that are not present in the WTFPL
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Is there actual in practice case law distinguishing them? I mean this question sincerely despite my skepticism.
  - rectang 5y ago
    There are tangible costs to crayon licenses, long before cases reach court. The more convoluted and amateurish the drafting, the more unclear the meaning and the more that lawyers make advising clients what to do about them. Sticking it to users who care about compliance is part of the appeal of licenses like the WTFPL, but it's ironic that the money flows to lawyers. When the ASF finally banned the JSON license for use in dependencies, the legal cost of figuring out compliance was one of the motivations cited by the people who proposed the ban.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      Some people think that a short and simple license keeps lawyers away. It's the very opposite. There's a good reason why GPL and contracts for renting an apartment, buying a car etc are so long: it's to reduce ambiguity.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago

orasis 5y ago

What license is the MIT license itself released under? Can licenses be copied and modified willy-nilly or do you need to license a license?

paxys 5y ago
That's a great question. The short answer – no one knows. Technically someone does own the copyright to these words, and if they are able to prove it they could sue every project that uses or refers to it, which is a troubling thought. That is very unlikely to happen, however, since the license originated at MIT (as the name suggests) and the current version is the result of a lot of iteration and modification done by many people over many decades.
- ghaff 5y ago
  And trademark probably plays in too IANAL. I assume coming up with your own Creative Commons license unrelated to that organization would be problematic.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Technically someone does own the copyright to these words, and if they are able to prove it they could sue every project that uses or refers to it, which is a troubling thought. That seems unlikely to be true. Recipes can't be copyrighted because they're functional. Legal licenses are also functional. (What's that? You think source code is functional? Shows what you know.)
1f60c 5y ago
No, the licenses themselves are protected by copyright as well. But the only license I can think of that explicitly states this fact is GPLv3, which begins: Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <https://fsf.org/> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
mike97 5y ago
Ksksjzkzjssjsjksssjsjjsjszjff

armchairhacker 5y ago

The MIT-2 License: Like the MIT license but you must put 2 instances somewhere in your attribution. It is per-license, so the whoever includes your work in their own project must put 4 instances, and so on.

paxys 5y ago
How quickly would the count of MIT-2 license files in your node_modules folder exceed the number of atoms in the universe?
- sgc 5y ago
  If your server crashes counting the MIT-2 license files, do they satisfy the requirements?
- idealmedtech 5y ago
  Approximately 240 sub licenses deep (2^3 ~ 10, 10^80 atoms in observable universe)
  - paxys 5y ago
    That's only for the case where project A depends on project B which depends on project C which depends on project D...240 projects deep. But what if each of them has more than 1 dependency? Also you'd have to sum up the entire series, since the licenses at every level are included in the folder, not just the top-level one.
    - idealmedtech 5y ago
      ~~Yes, in my head I was considering all of those to be, in their total, the "sublicenses." Should have been better worded; but a total of 240 distinct MIT licensed dependencies in a project is the number at which MIT-2 would run out of atoms to print on.~~ Nevermind, I see your point! In reality it would be something relating to N sums of 2^k, k being highest depth dependency for each of the N projects. Obviously we're talking bounds and not exact calculations here.

_Marak_ 5y ago

GNU Affero General Public License https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

needle0 5y ago

So MIT is "do attribute me" and I guess MIT-0 is "you don't need to attribute me (but it's fine if you do)", I wonder if there are any "explicitly do NOT attribute me" licenses?

gxnxcxcx 5y ago
Alan Smithee learns to code.
oefrha 5y ago
And guess what, there are very good reasons to use a do NOT attribute me license: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  You built a formula 1 race car and tossed the keys to kids with ego problems. Now i have to deal with Win10 0-days because this garbage. Never before have I been so motivated to write open source software.

fartcannon 5y ago

I predict a wave of articles and blog posts about how open source doesn't work in about 5 years, after the new generation of developers that Amazon convinces to use this licence complete the process of being out competed by Amazon using their own IP.

ilammy 5y ago
Now, without even a line of attribution whatsoever in a LICENSE file somewhere in the project.
CSSer 5y ago
I mean, I’m already pretty cynical about open source. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it doesn’t work, but I think that many open source projects, or at least many of the ones in the fairly juvenile domain in which I operate, have intentions thinly veiled by the guise of corporate altruism.
cowsandmilk 5y ago
Love that a 4 year old commit in a repo can cause people to come up with conspiracy theories just because it is AWS.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  And I love corporate apologists!

lobo_tuerto 5y ago

Why not use the referenced MIT-Zero license instead?

zeta0134 5y ago

I use this license for a few of my NES libraries, since they're meant to be used in homebrew games where memory is a real problem. 32kB of PRG ROM (and the associated 8k of CHR ROM) doesn't leave much extra room for text rendering systems or fonts, and every byte counts. Sure if there's room, attribute away, but for simpler games there's really no need. It's fine :)

bloaf 5y ago

Now I want a MIT--1 license that prohibits attributing the code to the author in any way, including in legal filings, and then you don't need any other part of the license.

skissane 5y ago

IANAL, but assuming a jurisdiction in which public domain dedications are likely to be legally valid (such as the US), is there any real difference between this license and a public domain dedication? Isn’t this functionally equivalent to the public domain, even if it is technically not? Public domain code, I can do whatever I want with it, even publish it with all indications of its origins removed. Legally fine. But it seems like the same thing here-for a downstream consumer at least. From the original developer’s viewpoint - the warranty disclaimer may give some additional legal protection, but you can put a warranty disclaimer in a public domain dedication too. People will debate whether warranty disclaimers in public domain dedications have the same legal force as those in copyright licenses-but maybe that too is a theoretical debate, because how big is the risk of someone being successfully sued by a code reuser who has zero commercial relationship (support or consulting contracts, etc) with the original developer-has that ever actually happened? Or are all these warranty disclaimers just lawyers saying “it’s never happened, but we can’t totally rule out the remote possibility that one day it might, so let’s just include some legalese to improve our position if anyone ever tries to make it happen - a disclaimer doesn’t cost anything significant anyway”?

nickelpro 5y ago
Prior work in the public domain can have implications for future licensed work derived from the public domain work. Releasing under an extremely permissive license does not relinquish copyright. Any future derived work by the author would still be unambiguously licensable under any conditions they see fit.
- skissane 5y ago
  > Prior work in the public domain can have implications for future licensed work derived from the public domain work. Isn't that just the normal case of a derived work? If you modify a public domain work, you don't have copyright on the parts which are identical to the public domain original, but you do have it on any non-trivial modifications/additions, and you can license the later (whether under an open source or proprietary license). A real world example is the Ghidra reverse engineering suite - it was originally written by US government employees in the course of their employment, and as such that original code is ineligible for copyright in the United States and automatically in the public domain in the US (although its legal status in non-US jurisdictions is rather more complex, variable, and at times even unsettled), and hence cannot be released under an open source license (or any other copyright license for that matter). But, they also accept outside contributions, which generally would be under copyright (whether by the contributor or their employer), and it is a condition of accepting those contributions that the contributor agrees to license them under the Apache 2 license. Hence, Ghidra is an amalgam of public domain code (or at least, public domain in the US) and copyrighted code licensed under Apache 2. I'm not aware this causes any problems in practice.

nickelpro 5y ago

I prefer zlib over this. If you're shipping my code in a binary I don't care about attribution, but if you're reproducing my entire repo in source code form don't claim that you wrote it

Tepix 5y ago
That's not what this license is for. It's for teaching where the attribution would be a nuisance.
- pas 5y ago
  wat!? I mean... yes it would, but isn't teaching proper care and attention of licensing important? If it's not the developer's original code then they ought to think at least a few minutes about where it came from and whether they have consent to use it and all that nuisance.
  - ldjb 5y ago
    From the Rationale section: This license has proven useful for code that is intended for developers to use as reference, teaching samples, examples, or templates that other developers may modify for their own purposes. I don't think teaching proper care and attention of licensing is incompatible with wanting to release teaching materials under a licence that does not require attribution.
    - mhitza 5y ago
      How is this license different/better than Creative Commons Zero (CC0)? When I think of written content, I always think&go for a CC license.
      - freemint 5y ago
        There is some general FUD for using CC licenses for code. The CC0 works for code but is a lot more complicated then 0BSD.

jayp1418 5y ago

I think NetBSD licensing is best : http://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html http://netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html

raggi 5y ago

What happens once there are layers of execution of the lack of attribution, but then someone downstream comes into a battle over provenance? They have to backtrack now even more poorly documented provenance in discovery? Sounds awful.

LugarOS 5y ago

At that point just go fully PD or CC0. Why have some random license nobody has heard of or wants to read about when you can just slap a CC0 sticker on it.

boyter 5y ago
If you are Australian or German public domain is not an option.
- notRobot 5y ago
  Hence CC0.

vasco 5y ago

> i.e., a license is preferable to a public domain dedication Are we that easy to fool by lawyers? The public domain is the public domain. Before someone comes out and says that the concept of dedicating IP to the public domain doesn't exist in some countries or is full of hidden perils, I'll ask you to provide a single case where code was attributed to the public domain and that became a problem for the author or for the users.

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
> The public domain is the public domain “I place this in the public domain” has a significantly different meaning in British English.
- bicolao 5y ago
  What does it mean in British English?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
    It relates to availability, not copyright. “Not secret” instead of “not copyrighted”. So if you say “the facts are in the public domain” in BrE, that might mean that they’ve been published in a newspaper. It doesn’t mean anything about their copyright status.
    - feeela 5y ago
      Still, in any other sane country on this planet, works in the public domain are to be used however one want's to.

mort96 5y ago

Is... Is Amazon allowed to just use the name "MIT" for its own unrelated license? Doesn't MIT have some say over the use of the name "MIT"? Can I make my own license and call it MIT-2, to make my license sound much more established and prestigious than it really is? Or is this a case of "it's OK because Amazon does it and nobody will sue them for it"?

deadbeeves 5y ago
I would think the only way they could be stopped is if "MIT" is a registered trademark. No idea if it is. But actually, would trademarks even apply in legal documents? A software license is not a product nor a business and there's no chance of confusing it with one, so could I publish a Disney™ Public License?
- intunderflow 5y ago
  It is a trademark - https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73797219&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73797219&caseType=SERIAL_...
- wongarsu 5y ago
  What makes you think that software licenses are not products? Licenses like the GPL or to a lesser degree the Apache 2.0 are products that took a lot of effort to produce and are marketed just like other products. And I wouldn't be surprised if lots of EULAs are basically the same license sold by some lawyer or consultant to multiple companies. Software licenses don't just fall from the heaven and get adopted on their own.
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> Is... Is Amazon allowed to just use the name "MIT" for its own unrelated license? Absolutely not.

d0ublespeak 5y ago

Imagine AWS wanting to get rid of attribution. Sounds like something that isn’t the slightest bit disingenuous.

conaclos 5y ago

For interested readers: you can find a quick comparison of licenses at https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ https://choosealicense.com/appendix/ MIT No Attribution is included in the comparison.

codeflo 5y ago

Oh for the love of God, don’t introduce confusingly named variants of widely known licenses. If a new license is really needed — fine, if lawyers think that’s necessary, it probably is — but don’t name it that. No one will bother to check whether MIT and MIT-7BZ3/2 are slightly incompatible.

rafaelturk 5y ago

maydup-nem 5y ago

no, thanks, i will stick with gpl

maydup-nem 5y ago
the pure satisfaction of getting downvoted by corposhills is immeasurable

Scorpiion 5y ago

FYI this is from 2018. I thought it was something released recently but saw on Github that it's from 2018.

johndfsgdgdfg 5y ago

This is an amazing effort from Amazon. I've noticed Amazon has always been a very developer friendly company.

cryptica 5y ago
Is this sarcasm? This license is horrible for developers. Attribution is literally the only thing they get out of open source. Any open source developer who uses this license could not possibly be using it out of their own free will.

JohnHaugeland 5y ago

This license was not released by MIT, and should not carry its name

clock99 5y ago

ram_rar 5y ago

Isn't MIT trademarked [1] ? Can anyone take a trademarked name for a license? [1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73797219&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=73797219&caseType=SERIAL_...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

feeela 5y ago

> a license is preferable to a public domain dedication Who says that and why? Why should I care about the complicated terms of a license - especially when such a license expresses essentially the same as "public domain"? Or in other words: is there any real rationale behind the above statement?