The basics about types of open-source software licenses, their differences, how to choose a license etc.
I use and support FOSS and gpl but this “guide” is poorly written. Use better wording. There are valid reasons to go for MIT.
The MIT is a very common and lax license today. It is one of the most common licenses for open source projects. Such licenses make exploitation of volunteers by big corporations as easy as taking candy from a child, so they can takeover the FOSS scene and make users pay the price for things that otherwise could be free (both in price and in freedom). That’s why all big corporations heavily push permissive licenses.
If you value freedom of software, don’t just use the MIT or other lax licenses, unless you have a good reason to do so.
We’ve managed to convince our workplace to allow us to use MIT on a few projects. We mainly share that code directly with customers, and it’s easier to do that with permissively licensed code, plus we can make it public for an extra win (both at work and for the community).
There are definitely good uses for permissive licenses. In the same way that you should consider not using one, you should also consider whether one meets your specific needs.
Exactly. Everything has it’s place.
Can I ask, what do you mean by “share code with out customers”? They modify this code? They only use this code? How are the dynamics?
We are somewhat similar to contractors and directly help our customers write their code. Usually this means bringing in some kind of starting template, and it’s easier to do this with a permissively licensed template than make them sign another legal agreement.
They own the code once we’re done, and they don’t need to make it open source (companies naturally don’t like to open source their products). Our templates are open source and well-documented, though.
Look up Kerberos and Microsoft.
