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.

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    14·
    6 days ago

    Well, the thing is, if you’re developing a library, you usually do so, because you want it to be useful to people in the ecosystem.
    By putting it under the GPL, you limit that usefulness to only those projects which are willing to also put themselves under the GPL. From an idealist point of view, I certainly also would like to say that people not willing to put their software under GPL don’t need to be my users. But from a library author point of view, I might as well not write a library then, since no one’s going to use it then.

    Many open-source projects are under a permissive license themselves. I might disagree with their choice, but I don’t really want to exclude those from using my library. They’re still doing good things. I would love to exclude specifically any proprietary software from using my library, but that’s not really something you can require in your license without excluding all those permissive open-source projects.

    So, to answer your question, I actually don’t think people are being tricked into it. I thought about choosing GPL for my libraries for a while (all my applications are under GPL) and decided against it. Which is a personal choice that others can disagree with, but all I’m saying is, I know what I’m doing, I wasn’t tricked to use a permissive license.