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lispisokyesterday at 6:01 PM3 repliesview on HN

"I released source code under the MIT license and people are now using it to their financial benefit. Who could have possibly seen this coming?"

Why does this keep happening? Why are so may developers blind to this obvious outcome?


Replies

deweyyesterday at 6:28 PM

MIT was always the easy default that every project used, you just select it from the GitHub dropdown and you are done when setting up a new project. I think you can't really blame people for using it.

Especially when your project is new it's also not often clear that this project will become something more serious later where you have to worry about such things as people cloning your project.

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jotaenyesterday at 9:15 PM

Why would this be surprising? The MIT license explicitly allows to relicense a project at any point. In this case, the Bear maintainer decided to start off with a permissive license and now exercised their rights to change to a more restrictive license due to changing requirements. To me, this seems actually quite reasonable.

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darkwateryesterday at 6:04 PM

Because between 15 and 20 years ago the BSD zealots won that culture war. I would really love to see a simulation where GNU licenses won that culture war and which landscape we would have today.

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