this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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A few people pointed out that many rust projects were MIT licensed and since then I indeed have seen MIT licensed projects everywhere in Rust. Then I found the link of this post and it looks like MIT was by far the most popular license in all of opensource in 2023.

Any ideas why?

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[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 54 points 6 days ago (15 children)

MIT allows the publication of derived work to be closed source, GPL doesn't. Thus, at least for corporations, it is an advantage to publish some code, e.g. libraries with MIT licence, so that it can become a commonly used "standard implementation", while their end user software remains closed source.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 10 points 6 days ago (13 children)

Thank you. That would explain why corporations use it (and the Apache license), however my guess is that most opensource projects aren't corporate. Do you maybe have a guess why non-corporations use MIT?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] nous@programming.dev 8 points 6 days ago

You would be surprised. A lot are written by people as part of their job or so they can use them for their job or being sponsored by a company to do the work. The people with the most time to contribute library code to rust are being paid to do it in one form or another.

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