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Comment by mplewis | Hacker News Reader

MIT is pretty much giving the project away. What are you talking about?

If they truly believed, then they wouldn't bother with a license. Someone who truly doesn't care about copyright wouldn't consider they need a license. The irony would be even more should someone break this license and these believers take them to court. I'm reminded of when the Church of Scientology hadn't bothered with registering the copyrights for many texts, only to rush to court once they leaked. They lost, mostly because they were true believers unable to admit the texts were not divinely inspired.

MIT does have stipulations:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

The counterintuitive bit you're pointing out is an artifact of law, not their political opinion. If you don't care about copyright you use a license that protects you from copyright claims while giving rights to others. Companies that rely on public domain or open source software can't legally use the code until it has a suitable license, the absence of a license being that the owner still holds those rights. So the only way to hold their position is to do what they're doing. More broadly they're also saying they don't believe any of this shit is enforceable so they denigrate their own license but provide it for your sake.

absolutely right.. actually we could've gone with a GPL license, yet we want to make sure the greatest degree of freedom is embedded in the rights to use this software and MIT's simple licensing looks like the most fit for that purpose.

GPL provides greater rights to users, MIT provides greater rights to developers. If your purpose was to have the greatest degree of freedom for usage rights, you probably should have gone with GPL.

That's a deft read on their objective here and, I think, an accurate one.

But, it does raise interesting questions regarding whether there are limitations to a system that is ultimately bound by the system that it seeks to disavow/displace.

They shouldn't believe that shipping a MVP will immediately displace the current legal system in which they are vulnerable to nuisance lawsuits over an implied warranty.

In the US if you don't put copyright on it, it will default to being the author's copyright and be legally unusable.

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