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by nicoburns 948 days ago
The following seems to be the major addition compared to the MIT license:

"Except as contained in this notice, the name of a copyright holder shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization of the copyright holder."

2 comments

There doesn't seem to be a single canonical MIT licence, but rather several co-existing variants of it. The part you quote is a standard part of the X11 variant [1], while the Expat variant does not include it.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License

The SPDX license identifiers are the best thing we have for defining what the canonical version is (which is used by expat): https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html

There are many MIT-derrived licenses, some of which have identifiers prefixed with MIT- and others like X11 and curl have independent identifiers: https://spdx.org/licenses/

All the more reason to avoid calling any one licence ‘the MIT licence’, in my opinion. While I appreciate that SPDX provides a comprehensive list unambiguous identifiers, I don’t really see why they would be best suited to determine which of the many variants a name has been used for is the best candidate.

That’s not to say they necessarily aren’t; I’d be interested to see if any rationale behind that choice has been published anywhere. But if the choice was made more or less arbitrarily, or based on what seemed more popular to the authors, I’d be inclined not to treat SPDX as an authority on the matter.

The existence of the advertising clause was always the main difference between the traditional BSD license and MIT license. The above is interesting because it's also an an advertising clause, but it does something the opposite of what the BSD advertising clause did. BSD wanted the license and the Regents to be mentioned in advertising.