You know that you can change license of software that you own copyright to? You can take GPL code and change it to something else, but you can’t un-GPL existing released code. It’s the same thing with MIT.
The only people bound by the license are people who use it because it is licensed to them.
The difference is that organisation may develop MIT software without publishing their code.
Why does it matter to you? If the developers are fine with the license and how the code they write can be used under it, that’s their prerogative.
That’s a bit short-sighted. On the level of the individual project you are right, it’s the dev’s choice. And I think permissive licenses also have a place with security critical software like crypto libraries, where everyone benefits from secure libraries being used as much as possible, even in proprietary software.
But on an ecosystem level, this trend to permissive licensing is very worrying, because if it reaches a critical mass, it opens us up to EEE scenarios. Android is already bad enough, only made bearable by Google having to release much of the source code. Imagine what it would be like today if Google had succeeded with their Fuchsia efforts. So we should at least be wary and give a little pushback to this trend. It’s valid to question if everything under the sun has to be rewritten and if it does, why does it have to be permissive licensing? What’s the end goal?
deleted by creator
I understand the sentiment.
The move to a permissive license opens the door for these tools to possibly become closed source one day.
You know that you can change license of software that you own copyright to? You can take GPL code and change it to something else, but you can’t un-GPL existing released code. It’s the same thing with MIT.
The only people bound by the license are people who use it because it is licensed to them.
The difference is that organisation may develop MIT software without publishing their code.
deleted by creator
That’s just it though. The developers can drop out over time, then some other corp can come in and control it, then close source it.
That’s a bit short-sighted. On the level of the individual project you are right, it’s the dev’s choice. And I think permissive licenses also have a place with security critical software like crypto libraries, where everyone benefits from secure libraries being used as much as possible, even in proprietary software.
But on an ecosystem level, this trend to permissive licensing is very worrying, because if it reaches a critical mass, it opens us up to EEE scenarios. Android is already bad enough, only made bearable by Google having to release much of the source code. Imagine what it would be like today if Google had succeeded with their Fuchsia efforts. So we should at least be wary and give a little pushback to this trend. It’s valid to question if everything under the sun has to be rewritten and if it does, why does it have to be permissive licensing? What’s the end goal?