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The authors have specifically said that it’s not. They just chose Rust community licensing norms, they don’t really care about licenses.
by steveklabnik 1y ago
The authors have specifically said that it’s not. They just chose Rust community licensing norms, they don’t really care about licenses.
- db48x 1y agoThat might be Canonical’s motive though.
- steveklabnik 1y agoThat's fair!
- bboozzoo 1y agoSeriously, how on earth are you coming up with this? Time and again they debunk those silly claims but people just keep bringing this up on and on. Is it some sort of conspiracy theory?
- db48x 1y agoIt could be a conspiracy on the part of Canonical, sure. People have hidden motives all the time. Sometimes you have to deduce their motives from their actions, while ignoring their words. I don't think there’s any serious evidence of it being true though. All we can see right now is that there are a surprising number of MIT-licensed packages replacing GPL-licensed packages. It could be a coincidence.
- pepoluan 1y agoSome of us in the Enterprise and Governmental sector try hard to avoid software with viral licenses. We sigh in relief every time we see a software that we rely upon changes/adds non-viral license such as MIT, Apache, MPL, BSD, and so on.
- saurik 1y agoAt best this just makes them a patsy, which isn't actually better; but it, also becomes pretty clear if you pay more attention and dig into this (watch some of their interviews, etc.) that they actually DO care about the license, and are splitting hairs on what that means: if they don't care, but they have users who do that will be disappointed if they went in a different direction, then they not only do care, but have chosen to actively align with those specific users. But, regardless, again, and most importantly: this is about why they have a niche and why Canonical is pushing this, and if you try to just right software in such an environment and actively truly actually don't care about the license and just YOLO it, then that level of cavalier negligence cannot be rewarded with immunity to guilt or culpability in the outcomes.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago"Licensing norms"? Are people really choosing software licenses without considering the implications just because it's a "norm"? This is gonna cause a lot of disappointment down the road.
- steveklabnik 1y agoIf most of an ecosystem chooses a specific license (dual licensed in Rust's case), the simplest thing to do is choose the same license as everyone else.
- cozzyd 1y agoThis may be reasonable if you're writing a library but not for applications.
- eadmund 1y agoRegardless of what others do, the best thing to do is to choose the best license for one’s own software. One which preserves the freedom of one’s users and the openness of one’s code.
- db48x 1y agoSadly people don’t always do what’s best. We sometimes do what other people are doing on the theory that maybe someone else has thought it through and already decided that it _is_ the best thing to do. It’s not perfect, but then heuristics rarely are. But it’s cheap to implement.
- tracker1 1y agoConsidering how often MIT is chosen over the slightly simpler ISC version... yeah. In the end, a lot of people are willing to write open source just for the sake of having it as it scratches their own need and isn't otherwise monetizable or they just think it should exist. I would never even consider touching a GPLv3 licensed UI library component, for example. It's not always the most appropriate license and if a developer wants to use a permissive license, they are allowed to. This isn't an authoritarian, communist dictatorship, at least it isn't where I live and to my dying breath won't be.