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is there something about rust which precludes copyleft licensing?
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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Do you think it was intentional ideological decision by the Rust developers or some other contributors/interests to make permissive the default? Or a random decision that has ended up being consequential because of the popularity of Rust?
I have noticed for a long time that github promotes MIT license. It lets you use any, of course, but puts a real positive shine on MIT. My perception is that this is a purposeful intervention by MS into FLOSS to promote MIT.
I think its just that the language having built in licensing is a newer concept as opposed to just having a companion document. And MIT and Apache are the licenses the pieces of the language is licensed under, so they made those default. That way it's a conscious decision to make it more restrictive.
how's it built in?
Rust crates manifest file requires a license be set to be hosted on crates.io and the example manifest file uses:
Something like the Java's jar manifest doesn't have a predefined license property for interpreters to parse. Maven has a property, but it's not required.
MS and other corps love MIT and related licenses because they can just take the code and basically do whatever with it in their projects, so it makes sense for them to promote it. Generally speaking, they won't touch GPL/AGPL as it would force them to distribute their source.
I believe it was a very intentional choice to use a permissive license for Rust. If they hadn't, it would not have been as popular as it is today, nor would it have big money behind it. https://rustfoundation.org/members