9 ms·
It would be interesting if it was further explained why it is believed that picking the MIT license (rather than a copyleft license) was a key to success. Is t
by mikece 1y ago
It would be interesting if it was further explained why it is believed that picking the MIT license (rather than a copyleft license) was a key to success. Is there anything Rails could not have done had it been GPL licensed instead of MIT?
- hk1337 1y agoI wouldn't be all that surprised to hear the real reason Rails chose MIT license was because that's what everyone else was doing. I remember there was a surge of projects on Github, almost all of them MIT license.
- hakunin 1y agoWasn't Rails the first major OSS to move to Github when Github first appeared? IIRC it's the other way around: everyone started using MIT because Rails did. Edit: Here's the initial commit in 2004, with MIT License already in there, way before Github launched in 2008 — https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/db045dbbf60b53dbe013ef25554fd013baf88134 https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/db045dbbf60b53dbe013ef...
- hk1337 1y agoPerhaps, yes. My main thought was there wasn't a lot of thought behind choosing the license back then.
- holman 1y agoThings were going quickly on the run-up to Rails moving over, but even so, Rails was pretty aggressive at jumping on GitHub when they did, and it was one of our first real "major" open source projects on the site, in hindsight. There was a huge difference pre-Rails and post-Rails.
- MangoToupe 1y agoGithub itself was written with rails, yea? Seems almost like mutualistic dogfooding.
- NullCascade 1y agoSome companies have strict "call the legal department before using GPL/AGPL software" policies.
- pmontra 1y agoBut they were using Linux anyway (that's GPL 2, plus all the userland sw) especially with Rails which used to be a nightmare to run on Windows. Macs were OK. AGPL could have been a problem though. I wonder if monkey patching a Rails class would be derivative work.