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The term "MIT License" has also been used to refer to the Expat License (used for the XML parsing library Expat) and to the X11 License (also called "MIT/X Consortium License"; used for X Window System by the MIT X Consortium). [3] Furthermore, the "MIT License" as published by the Open Source Initiative is the same as the Expat License. [14]
The Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". [6] GitHub's choosealicense website describes the permissive MIT license as "[letting] people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable."
For example, the MIT license describes the right to sublicense. [54] One of the strengths of open-source development is the continual process where developers can build on the derivative works of each other and combine their projects into collective works.
There are licenses accepted by the OSI which are not free as per the Free Software Definition. The Open Source Definition allows for further restrictions like price, type of contribution and origin of the contribution, e.g. the case of the NASA Open Source Agreement, which requires the code to be "original" work.
The most popular open source licenses as of 2022 are the Apache License (permissive), the MIT License (permissive), and the GPL (copyleft). If software is in the public domain, the owner's copyright has been extinguished and anyone may use the work with no copyright restrictions. [1]
A GitHub study in 2015 on their statistical data found that the MIT license was the most prominent FOSS license on that platform. [38] In June 2016 an analysis of the Fedora Project's packages showed as most used licenses the GPL family, followed by MIT, BSD, the LGP family, Artistic (for Perl packages), LPPL (for texlive packages
In January 2016 Microsoft released Chakra as open source under the MIT License; the code is available on GitHub. [65] Microsoft's stance on open source has shifted as the company began endorsing more open-source software. In 2016, Steve Balmer, former CEO of Microsoft, has retracted his statement that Linux is a malignant cancer. [66]
The Unlicense software license, published around 2010, offers a public-domain waiver text with a fall-back public-domain-like license, inspired by permissive licenses but without an attribution clause. [12] [13] In 2015 GitHub reported that approximately 102,000 of their 5.1 million licensed projects, or 2%, use the Unlicense. [note 3]