Open Source

35453 readers

621 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (6 children)

soo you are saying people are tricked into it?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why is it an MIT project in the first place?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (3 replies)