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MIT licence can be community hostile (lesinskis.com)
6 points by JanisL on June 11, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


As a counterpoint, I generally prefer using MIT repos/libraries because cognitively I don't need to think or worry about how/when/where/underwhatconditions I can use the repo. I don't contribute as much as I could (due to my employer) but the little that I have and the few repos I've made have all been under MIT because I want to perpetuate this cognitive freedom for others.


But this "cognitive freedom" is an illusion because for many people in many jurisdictions the lack of explicit patent clauses in the MIT license causes potential patent issues. As a business owner I'm actually increasingly worried about the patent trolling angle with MIT derivatives as time goes on (I believe MIT has legal precedent regarding patents in some places like the USA but not others). If you want a permissive license that's easy for people to use then you can always use Apache version 2 or the MPLv2, with these there's less worries of patent issues.




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