from Hacker News

The Origin of the “MIT License” (2020)

by tkhattra on 2/3/23, 1:45 AM with 19 comments

• by dctoedt on 2/3/23, 2:41 PM

  FTA: "As it turned out, the licensing strategy had the desired effect: the goal of influence was realized. ...

  "Furthermore, the good will that was gained from free distribution of these software packages led to the flow back of both funding and software applications that support research and education at MIT. The cash flow has dwarfed the forgone revenue stream that likely would have come from licensing for a fee, and even that sum has been dwarfed by the value of the applications that became available.

  "A lesson is that it can be important to look past the prospect of licensing for a fee, which may bring in a few dollars, and instead see the opportunity that opens if you give the software away. The potential reward can be orders of magnitude larger."

  (Extra paragraphing added.)

• by bhickey on 2/3/23, 2:59 PM

  I asked rms and Hal Abelson about this a few years ago.

  Stallman said:

  > The term "MIT license" is a confusion. It is used to describe two different licenses; see https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html. We call them the X11 license and the Expat license. To distinguish them, we do not use the term "MIT license". The X11 license was, as far as I know, first used by X11. I don't know how it was written -- the question is not interesting to me.

  Thanks Richard.

  Hal recalled that it was drafted by Karen Hershey at the request of the Technology Transfer Office. Regretfully I don't have a copy of his original response.

• by ghaff on 2/3/23, 2:35 PM

  The article provides some early on documentation that I wasn't able to find when I wrote the piece referenced in footnote 1. [0] It doesn't really get into--I suspect because no one is really sure what/when the changes happened--how the various changes in wording it mentions towards the end eventually morphed into the current (OSI-approved) MIT license.

  The current license actually matches a related but different license than the X11 license and at least one open source IP lawyer I know suspects there may have been a minor mixup when the "MIT license" was approved by OSI.

  [0] https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license

• by icambron on 2/3/23, 2:52 PM

  I took a class from Saltzer in 2002 or 2003 and it was spectacular. A sort of survey-level runthrough of software architecture and system design. He seemed to really enjoy teaching it too.

• by thelastbender12 on 2/3/23, 2:41 PM

  Neat to know MIT License did actually originate at the eponymous institution.

  When I first got access to the internet, MIT seemed awfully productive in producing code. Before I found out that MIT License doesn't imply the work was done by a person at MIT!

• by jmclnx on 2/3/23, 1:57 PM

  Interesting timeline, seems the MIT License came out a few years before the GPL. I wonder if/what discussions RMS had with the authors of the MIT License at that time when he was crafting the GPL.

• by lukeh on 2/3/23, 6:29 AM

  Noting that MIT Kerberos isn’t shipped with macOS or Windows, although it compiles in both.

• by froh on 2/3/23, 2:05 PM

  so a most liberal and a most intrusive concept of software freedom both originate at MIT.