this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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I'm pretty sure that MIT license is that popular out of ignorance, instead of an informed decision to allow corporate to steal and make money out of their code.
I've known people IRL who talk about the GPL like it's a virus infecting your code
I remember this confusion a LOT back when main-branch Blender had its own game engine built in.
Forums were full of people saying crap like :
"Don't use that, because since you used Blender which is GPL it means you have to provide the source code to your incredible GOTY contender and then everybody will beat you at life!!!"
I'd like to think that is so but some here will argue non-copyleft licenses are "more free". Ime they don't reply after I point out that's the freedom to deny others freedom.
It's freedom nonetheless.
Widen the scope to consider downsteam users (the dev's user's users and beyond) and now the potential lack of any software freedom makes it freedom muchtheless.
So you want to restrict dev's freedom to choose whichever license they want?
I prevent others from relicensing my works under less-free licenses or making them non-free by using Copyleft/share-a-like licenses.
Respectfully disagree. I can only speculate why other developers choose MIT. But for small and medium-sized projects, a more restrictive license is unlikely to protect them from this scenario anyway. And if that's true, one could argue it's better to go down a road where corporate sponsorships are potentially more likely.
Personally, I often choose MIT because I don't care who uses my code and for what, and I'd prefer that it be easy to borrow from. I used to be concerned about how my code was used, but over the years I've developed a strong dislike for copyright as a concept in general so I fight it how I can. Some of my projects are so simple that even MIT seems like overkill. In those cases I use the Unlicense.