A permalink for your MIT License | Hacker News Reader

A permalink for your MIT License

github.com

24 pointsjayeshsalvi8 comments

The reason you include the license in your project is so that if the person clones the repo or downloads the tar.gz/zip, they get the license with it, even if it is offline.

While it is a kind thing to try to do this for folks, linking to a license is not a good idea.

Also, while it isn't as commonplace as it was in the early 2000s, legally, I'm told it is still the best idea to include the license in every file of your project where there is significant value. I don't personally think the clutter is worth it, but then again, I've not written something so important that if the license were pissed upon that I would "gather guns" and sue.

Additionally, even though MIT is still bread and butter as far as I'm concerned (and I'm a Ruby guy and Rails, etc. use it), some claim Apache is better if you are concerned about the strength of the license.

The MIT license is also tiny!

I could possibly see this as a novel way to generate a license the first time for a project (eg. save it in the source tree). However, linking to a version has such a slight benefit, and many potential negatives, that I can't really see why someone would want to do it.

At a minimum it should be in your headers, otherwise we have no idea how to proceed. We are actually running into that issue at work because something we use has a header file with just a copyright in it and no license.

This is bizarre. Developers are donating to remy to pre-pay a domain name forward to 2032, to host something that can be easily (and much more correctly from a legal perspective) be included in the root folder, README.md + source headers of any open-source project.

I suspect nobody involved in this 'project' has really tried to understand OSS licensing or why it's important - instead let's just Host All The Things!

I've made a habit out of just linking to the OSI page: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

And I'm quite a fan of http://www.tldrlegal.com/license/mit-license

Just spotted an increase in pull requests and auto-generated user pages from the curl command and spotted HN had found this project.

Thought I'd chime in an reply to a few of the comments here.

1. Will it be online in 10 years? Yes - .org domains can only be registered up to 10 years in advance (though we've had donations going up to 2032). Check `whois mit-license.org | grep Expiration` and you'll see 16-Oct-2021 (I need to add this year).

2. "This is bizarre...just Host All The Things!". Partially you're right, but if you read the very first line of the README.md I explain why I wanted to host it:https://github.com/remy/mit-license

TL;DR: because I nearly always forget to include the file, and if I do, I usually forget to change it from project to project, and from year to year (also why I don't like to the opensource.org url - the date is a placeholder).

This would let me include just the url in my script headers (and someone else noted, and you're right on, what if you're offline? Arguably, the "mit-license.org" part of the URL should help the reader know what the license is - even if they can't read the contents).

Like I said, just chiming in. I'm not saying anyone here is wrong or right - it's just something I made for myself, and figured it might be useful to more than just me.

Will it be still there 10 years later? That's how I decide to use such a thing.

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