I often see Rust mentioned at the same time as MIT-type licenses.

Is it just a cultural thing that people who write Rust dislike Libre copyleft licenses? Or is it baked in to the language somehow?

Edit: It has been pointed out that I meant to say “copyleft”, not “libre”, so edited the title and body likewise.

  • some@programming.devOPEnglish
    2·
    9 days ago

    It’s not really something developers want to think about very much so they often just use the default.

    Do you think it was intentional ideological decision by the Rust developers or some other contributors/interests to make permissive the default? Or a random decision that has ended up being consequential because of the popularity of Rust?

    I have noticed for a long time that github promotes MIT license. It lets you use any, of course, but puts a real positive shine on MIT. My perception is that this is a purposeful intervention by MS into FLOSS to promote MIT.

    • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      2·
      9 days ago

      I think its just that the language having built in licensing is a newer concept as opposed to just having a companion document. And MIT and Apache are the licenses the pieces of the language is licensed under, so they made those default. That way it’s a conscious decision to make it more restrictive.

        • irotsoma@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          2·
          8 days ago

          Rust crates manifest file requires a license be set to be hosted on crates.io and the example manifest file uses:

          [package] 
license = "MIT OR Apache-2.0"

          Something like the Java’s jar manifest doesn’t have a predefined license property for interpreters to parse. Maven has a property, but it’s not required.