Post #1554393

2026-04-23 00:28 UTC

The mit license allows someone (some company) to modify the open source codebase and sell the result without making their modifications public. It allows the software equivalent of the enclosure of the commons. If there was a particularly large or significant and widespread codebase —like for example the coreutils— that was used everywhere and mit licensed, a company could make their own slightly different coreutils without publicizing the differences and use their position in the market to enclose the commons of knowledge about the use of that software. Such a situation would lead to a fractured feature ecosystem and confusion around best practices. In that environment, the biggest and most popular software distributor would benefit because their product would be most common and therefore the best target to design around. I know there’s a lot of “coulds” and “woulds” in that sentence, but that’s exactly what happened in the 80s and 90s with the ostensibly open source Unix codebase and the reason why the gpl was invented.

Replies (3)

@arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 2026-04-23 03:52

It’s already fractured, as I literally mentioned. That’s why it’s hard to write cross-platform scripts.

Open ##1554391
@pound_heap@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-23 03:17

Is rust-coreutils being developed by Canonical? Then it sounds like shooting themselves in the foot. Why give competitors a chance to take over a vital package that is at the core of their OS?

Open ##1555346
@MangoCats@feddit.it 2026-04-23 19:11

The mit license allows someone (some company) to modify the open source codebase and sell the result without making their modifications public. That is not equivalent to closure of the commons, that’s some company spinning a proprietary version of something. If they try to sell it, most people won’t buy - most people will continue to use the FOSS version. The people they sell it to may enjoy the proprietary enhancements, but that doesn’t prevent the FOSS community from developing those enhancements in the open if they so choose. MIT license is not a software patent.

Open ##1591561