The MIT license. What does it do?

3 points

11 years ago

There are arguably too many threads about the [MIT license][1] on the internet. What's worse is that most of them contradict each other or are at the very least misleading.

Let's try to figure it out together, shall we.

The license starts with a definition of the word "software." Specifically, it says that software isn't just code, but also "associated documentation files." Cool.

What follows is a detailed description of all the things you can do "without restriction, including without limitation." The things you're allowed to do are pretty much all the things. Cool.

In order to get to do all those things you need to satisfy a condition. The condition is to include the copyright notice and the permission notice in all copies. For the MIT license, that's pretty much everything but the disclaimer at the end. Cool.

All that seems pretty clear to me, and yet, you find comments like:

- You have to retain the original copyright.

- You aren't allowed to remove license comments from individual files.

- You aren't allowed to remove copyright notices from individual files.

The list keeps going. I'm sure you've read (hopefully not written) many of them yourself. I'd love to find out where these interpretations come from.

Assuming that I have a credits page* (not sure how you'd satisfy the condition without one) that includes the licenses, why wouldn't I be allowed to remove whatever I want from the code? "Without restriction" sounds unambiguous to me.

*If you're building native apps your "credits page" might be a directory hidden deep inside your app bundle.