UPDATE: I found this issue explaining the relicensing of rust game engine Bevy to MIT + Apache 2.0 dual. Tldr: A lot of rust projects are MIT/Apache 2.0 so using those licenses is good for interoperability and upstreaming. MIT is known and trusted and had great success in projects like Godot.
ORIGINAL POST:
RedoxOS, uutils, zoxide, eza, ripgrep, fd, iced, orbtk,…
It really stands out considering that in FOSS software the GPL or at least the LGPL for toolkits is the most popular license
Most of the programs I listed are replacements for stuff we have in the Linux ecosystem, which are all licensed under the (L)GPL:
uutils, zoxide, eza, ripgrep, fd -> GNU coreutils (GPL)
iced, orbtk -> GTK, QT (LGPL)
RedoxOS -> Linux kernel, most desktop environments like GNOME, KDE etc. all licensed GPL as much as possible
I have never heard anyone claim that GPL or LGPL are the most popular licenses for tools. From what I’ve seen it’s the opposite. MIT is by far the most popular by an insane margin. So much so that when I see an lgpl license I’m surprised.
The newer FOSS projects have a preference for permissive licenses like MIT. That’s due to a narrative going around that copyleft licenses like GPL are somehow ‘less free’. Apparently, GPL etc are not free enough that companies avoid such projects. And if you want your project to be adopted, you have to avoid these licenses. You can easily guess who is behind such narratives and why.
GPL is basically a contract that code will always be shared if distributed. This licence ensure any distributed library will give your code (legal standpoint).
MIT is more a use as you want licence. Devs can take the code, build and distribute binaries without restrictions.
They are not made for the same reasons. If you want to write Libre software, GPL is your friend.
As other says, rust build statically by default, having a MIT ecosystem help to spread the langage. Yet, this also mean someone can see its code used in a commercial product without sharing back, credits or counterpart.
Different uses.
