( I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. This is not the opinion of my school, employer or personal lawyer. Contact a real lawyer for actual legal advice. :) )
The MIT license has become popular in software development but I see it as possibly one of the worst licenses to ever exist, and I will explain why.
The software movement is made up of volunteer developers who have the best intentions and who create amazing software and then release it freely to anyone for any purpose.
I am also not the biggest fan of the MIT License for the reasons mentioned in this article.
There also is the LGPL as a permissive version of the GPL and I wonder how it really differs from MIT.
LGPL is not permissive in the sense BSD, MIT, Apache, Python, etc. are.
LGPL is still strongly copyleft, the only real difference from GPL is that it allows you to incorporate it into larger piece of work that isn’t under GPL, provided you allow the user to freely modify and replace the LGPL parts.
As a result it really doesn’t make much sense for anything but dynamically linked libraries that can be easily replaced.
On the other hand permissive licenses allow you to relicense the work completely. They have been deliberately created (often by universities) to be used regardless of commercial or proprietary status.
Probably best illustrating example is the Berkeley socket interface that single-handedly became the way to implement internet enabled applications for virtually any OS (including some implementation bugs)
I am also not the biggest fan of the MIT License for the reasons mentioned in this article. There also is the LGPL as a permissive version of the GPL and I wonder how it really differs from MIT.
LGPL is not permissive in the sense BSD, MIT, Apache, Python, etc. are. LGPL is still strongly copyleft, the only real difference from GPL is that it allows you to incorporate it into larger piece of work that isn’t under GPL, provided you allow the user to freely modify and replace the LGPL parts. As a result it really doesn’t make much sense for anything but dynamically linked libraries that can be easily replaced.
On the other hand permissive licenses allow you to relicense the work completely. They have been deliberately created (often by universities) to be used regardless of commercial or proprietary status.
Probably best illustrating example is the Berkeley socket interface that single-handedly became the way to implement internet enabled applications for virtually any OS (including some implementation bugs)
Thanks for the explanation. :)