December 26, 2025, 12:15am 1

I stumbled upon this video recently which heavily criticizes Rust. While I don’t agree with all the points of the video, the critique at the 44 minute mark that did resonate with me was the disturbing trend of projects being rewritten in Rust moving from a copyleft GPL license to a permissive MIT.

With some extra free time over the holidays, I looked up and read the article referenced by the video. It’s a short read, so I encourage you all to read it as well! In this article, the author links a second article of his (aren’t academics great at referencing their own work ) that describes the major downsides of choosing an MIT license over a GPL one.

After consuming these three pieces of content, it has me curious: what is the Zig community’s stance on licensing? Is there a valid use case for permissive licenses?

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For me it’s simple MIT for every project I don’t really care about, GPL if I ever really care

Zambyte December 26, 2025, 3:38am 3

I honestly believe licenses like MIT/BSD are the most commonly violated copyright licenses. They are simple and easy to understand, but people realize that and put literally no effort into trying to understand them, and just treat them as public domain. GPL is harder to understand (longer text), but most people have enough of a gist to know how to not violate it (though often a too narrow understanding, and avoid it needlessly at times).

I generally find copyright to be a bogus idea, but especially so in the case of software. I started to write a rant about copyright in general, but I’ll keep it to myself for now since it seems a bit off topic on this forum. My ideal is publishing without a license and having people rightly treat it as CC0 / public domain, since it’s none of my business telling other people how to use their computers. Living in a reality where people are scared of returning to a world without copyright (and wouldn’t touch my unlicensed software), copyleft is a fairly useful tool available to fight for sane treatment of software.

To me, copyleft is a way to fight against copyright in general. I’d love to see the world return to being rid of it, so I use it.

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Honestly gpl is super annoying and gets in the way at work or when building your own commercial projects. MIT is good for libraries because it doesn’t get in your way. It’s not about being compensated it’s about needing the tool yourself often for a commercial purpose. By making it MIT you ensure that you can also use it the next time you need it. The fact that big tech benefits and rarely contributes is an unfortunate side effect. For me a perfect license would be MIT freedom for anyone until they reach a LARGE threshold.

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mnemnion December 26, 2025, 4:57pm 5

Absolutely hilarious to me that the projects listed are a bunch of GPL-licensed GNU clones of other people’s software, almost entirely from the Berkeley Software Distribution. You’ll never guess what license BSD uses.

This person seems to labor under the misapprehension that ‘free software’ means use of copyleft licenses, despite the Free Software Foundation taking great pains to explain that this isn’t the case. I conclude that the opinions of said person may be safely disregarded.

GPL can sometimes be a win, seems to be a good choice for end-user graphical applications for example. I suspect Bambu would have been happy to rip off PrusaSlicer and release a proprietary version of it, if that had been allowed, but it wasn’t, and as a result we have OrcaSlicer, which is good. Things are working as intended.

For most cases, I have no interest in compelling anyone who might use my code to publish changes to it. I certainly do not intend to enter a courtroom, pursuant to a lawsuit intended to force compliance with the terms. So if I’m not going to bite, why bark?

Therefore I choose permissive licenses, almost always. Empirically this seems to be working out. I conclude that the shift in that direction is the free choice of other developers reasoning through the situation in a similar fashion to how I have.

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ppipelin December 26, 2025, 5:07pm 6

I can imagine a world where a company would develop a better tool from an MIT repo, so good it gets integrated in a lot of distros replacing the slow-moving MIT repo. Copyleft looks useful to avoid this for me

I try to remember if something like that already happened at big scale, if anyone find something…

kristoff December 26, 2025, 5:16pm 7

I don’t think that Rust users are using MIT because Rust is MIT (as the author of the video says might be the reason), and frankly I find that assumption kinda funny.

In my opinion there’s a much more direct and obvious reason: Rust programmers are on average much younger than C devs and they simply don’t care about the Free Software movement.

@ScottRedig posted a comment a while ago about choosing a license that I agree with, I’ll leave it to him to link it if he wants to.

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I understand, that makes sense. But as an exception, if someone wants to stop most large companies from using their code without contributing back (when they make a change), a viral license will stop them because they self-enforce all their use of 3rd party software. Of course, they probably just won’t use it at all.

mattnite December 27, 2025, 1:03am 9

I’ve started an experiment where I’m going to release most of my own code using the PolyForm Small Business License.

If they’re an individual, or small enough shop, I want them to be able to use, modify, make money using software I write. I don’t care that much about others contributing back modifications or improvements. If they are a big enough enterprise then they can contribute some dollars to my bank account.

The nice part with this license is that if I don’t like the outcomes fo the experiment it will be easy to relicense.

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pachde December 27, 2025, 2:26am 10

I like the intent of that polyform license, but I think it needs some work. There are some grammatical errors that might impede its effectiveness. I was left unclear about what it means for larger businesses, non-profit organizations, or educational entities.

mattnite December 27, 2025, 7:51am 11

That’s a good point, I think the licenses are intended to be modular. This one is specifically allowing you to use the software if you are X, I think for nonprofit organizations and education institutions, you’d want to also use the noncommercial license they have – I’ll have to add that as well.

Larger businesses can reach out and negotiate their own agreement.

kj4tmp December 27, 2025, 8:32am 12

Personally, It can be easy for me to be obsessive about things like this, and I remind myself that nobody is helped at all if the software isn’t finished… so if you have contributors / sponsors, discuss with them. They will determine if your project will last longer than a $MEDIUM_DURATION anyway. And if you don’t have collaborators, perhaps focus on how you can personally benefit from it first, because it might help you stay motivated to finish it (dogfood it). Perhaps even consider not releasing it. Whatever puts you at ease. It’s not like you’re getting paid anyway :), and if you’re not getting paid…stop putting expectations on yourself like you are!

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