is there something about rust which precludes copyleft licensing? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by some@programming.dev to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[-] enemenemu@lemm.ee 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's kind of the default in the docs

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/manifest.html?highlight=License#the-license-and-license-file-fields

SPDX license expressions support AND and OR operators to combine multiple licenses.1

  [package]
   # ...
  license = "MIT OR Apache-2.0"

Using OR indicates the user may choose either license. Using AND indicates the user must comply with both licenses simultaneously. The WITH operator indicates a license with a special exception. Some examples:

MIT OR Apache-2.0
LGPL-2.1-only AND MIT AND BSD-2-Clause
GPL-2.0-or-later WITH Bison-exception-2.2

When I started out (I don't write Rust but other languages), in my first years, I liked gpl and after a couple of years I got to know MIT and I started using that because I thought it is "more free". I wasn't aware of the consequences immediately. Once I read the GNU philosophy and started reading more about free software, I started using gplv3 again

[-] some@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago

soo you are saying people are tricked into it?

[-] enemenemu@lemm.ee 5 points 6 days ago

You could say that, yes.

It makes sense to suggest MIT license for a MIT project

MIT is better than proprietary. MIT does not force you to not make your project free.

[-] some@programming.dev 2 points 6 days ago

Why is it an MIT project in the first place?

[-] enemenemu@lemm.ee 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I am no dev of rust.

My guess:

they didn't want to scare anyone.
They really think that MIT is free and that anyone shall do with it whatever they like. They are not afraid that someone takes the rust code base and produces a proprietary fork and make money from it.