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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

The authors have specifically said that it’s not. They just chose Rust community licensing norms, they don’t really care about licenses.

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At best this just makes them a patsy, which isn't actually better; but it, also becomes pretty clear if you pay more attention and dig into this (watch some of their interviews, etc.) that they actually DO care about the license, and are splitting hairs on what that means: if they don't care, but they have users who do that will be disappointed if they went in a different direction, then they not only do care, but have chosen to actively align with those specific users. But, regardless, again, and most importantly: this is about why they have a niche and why Canonical is pushing this, and if you try to just right software in such an environment and actively truly actually don't care about the license and just YOLO it, then that level of cavalier negligence cannot be rewarded with immunity to guilt or culpability in the outcomes.

That might be Canonical’s motive though.

That's fair!

Seriously, how on earth are you coming up with this? Time and again they debunk those silly claims but people just keep bringing this up on and on. Is it some sort of conspiracy theory?

It could be a conspiracy on the part of Canonical, sure. People have hidden motives all the time. Sometimes you have to deduce their motives from their actions, while ignoring their words.

I don't think there’s any serious evidence of it being true though. All we can see right now is that there are a surprising number of MIT-licensed packages replacing GPL-licensed packages. It could be a coincidence.

Some of us in the Enterprise and Governmental sector try hard to avoid software with viral licenses.

We sigh in relief every time we see a software that we rely upon changes/adds non-viral license such as MIT, Apache, MPL, BSD, and so on.

"Licensing norms"? Are people really choosing software licenses without considering the implications just because it's a "norm"?

This is gonna cause a lot of disappointment down the road.

If most of an ecosystem chooses a specific license (dual licensed in Rust's case), the simplest thing to do is choose the same license as everyone else.

This may be reasonable if you're writing a library but not for applications.

Regardless of what others do, the best thing to do is to choose the best license for one’s own software. One which preserves the freedom of one’s users and the openness of one’s code.

Sadly people don’t always do what’s best. We sometimes do what other people are doing on the theory that maybe someone else has thought it through and already decided that it _is_ the best thing to do. It’s not perfect, but then heuristics rarely are. But it’s cheap to implement.

Considering how often MIT is chosen over the slightly simpler ISC version... yeah.

In the end, a lot of people are willing to write open source just for the sake of having it as it scratches their own need and isn't otherwise monetizable or they just think it should exist. I would never even consider touching a GPLv3 licensed UI library component, for example.

It's not always the most appropriate license and if a developer wants to use a permissive license, they are allowed to. This isn't an authoritarian, communist dictatorship, at least it isn't where I live and to my dying breath won't be.

Of course it's allowed. People can do whatever they want. If they think it over, consider the implications of what they are doing and decide that this is what they want, then by all means.

Choosing licenses due to peer pressure is completely stupid though. If you're not sure, you can just not pick a license at all. Copyright 2025 all rights reserved. If you must pick a license just because, then the reasonable choice is the strongest copyleft license available, simply because it maximizes leverage. The less you give away, the more conditions, the more leverage. It's that simple.

That people are actually feeling "pressure" to pick permissive licenses leads me to conclude this is a psyop. It's a wealth transfer, from well meaning developers straight into the pockets of corporations. It's being actively normalized so that people choose it "by default" without thinking. Yeah, just give it all away! Who cares, right?

I urge people to think about what they are doing.

I made some open source software myself and my desire is to see my code used as widely as possible.

So the ONLY reasonable choice for me is to release my code with a non-viral license. A copyleft license is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE for me because it limits the reach of my software.

(My license of choice is MPL-2.0)

Have you thought about it? If you have given it serious thought and decided that this is what you want, then by all means, go ahead.

The problem is that people choose permissive licenses to be "nice" when the truth is they have tons of unwritten rules and hidden assumptions. Magical thinking like "if I publish this open source software then it will come back to me in some way, maybe a job, maybe a sponsorship." No such deal exists. Then they wake up one day with corporations making billions off of their software while they're not making even one cent, and they suddenly have a very public meltdown where they bitterly regret their decisions. I've seen it happen, even with copyleft licenses.

When I publish something under MIT/ISC, it's generally, I wrote this to solve a problem/need, if anyone else finds it useful, cool. Use it for whatever you like.

If I'm writing something I intend or might intend to monetize later or otherwise don't want to have privatized, I'll probably reach for GPLv3, AGPL or a different license. The less "whole" a thing is, the more likely I'm going to use a more permissive license than not. Libraries or snippets of code are almost always going to be permissive at least from me. This includes relatively simple CLI utils.

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