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by gakada 3552 days ago
It's funny that the MIT license has the reputation of being "The license you choose when you don't care about attribution, or it would be unreasonable to require attribution".

As the article points out, copies of MIT licensed code must include not only the copyright line but the whole damn license.
1 comments
tbirdz 3552 days ago
Indeed, for works where I don't care about attribution for binary users I use the zlib license [0] which says "This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution."

You'd still have to include the notice in any source distribution, but that's not really as onerous in my opinion, since you're already having to distribute all your source files, so what's just one more notice.

Of course, my projects normally use a language with a compiler that produces binaries. I'm not sure how this would apply to a language that keeps things in source form like javascript. Maybe webasm will become the new binary form? asm.js? minified javascript?

0: https://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib

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CamperBob2 3552 days ago
You'd still have to include the notice in any source distribution, but that's not really as onerous in my opinion, since you're already having to distribute all your source files, so what's just one more notice.

But neither MIT nor zlib require you to distribute any source files. With zlib it's pretty clear what's expected, but with MIT, I'm actually not sure what attribution if any is required in a binary-only distribution.

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tbirdz 3552 days ago
Just to clarify my previous statement. I didn't mean to imply that zlib or MIT require you to distribute your source. I meant that if you are distributing your source code (for reasons other than any requirement from zlib or MIT licenses), then it's not too much of an additional burden to include the zlib license attribution, because you'd already be including the files that I had licensed under zlib, and each of those files has a little header saying it's licensed under zlib. Including the zlib license is then not much more work than including another source file from the project.

The way I've seen MIT interpreted most often is that you have to distribute the license and attribution even for binary only distribution, or distribution in binary form as part of a larger work.

But you're right the language does seem kind of vague on what "The Program" actually means.

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jhasse 3551 days ago
+1000! IMHO the zlib license is also easier to read and understand.
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