MIT License vs GPL. Line by line analysis of the MIT license
According to the Free Software Foundation, this license is more accurately called the X11 License, since MIT used many licenses in the past, and in its current form it was written for the X Window System.
MIT-licensed software includes Expat, Metakit, PuTTY, Bitcoin-Qt, Mono, Ruby on Rails, Twisted, JQuery, Prototype and, of course, the X Window System (X11), for which it was written.
License text
Copyright (c)<год> <владельцы прав>
This license permits persons who obtain a copy of the software and accompanying documentation (hereinafter referred to as the “Software”) to use the Software without limitation, without limitation, including the unrestricted right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sale of copies of the Software, as well as to persons to whom this Software is provided, subject to the following conditions:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGE OR OTHER CLAIM, INCLUDING WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE OR OTHERWISE. WITH SOFTWARE.
Original text(English)
Copyright (c)
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge , publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
- (English) . - MIT license template. official text. Retrieved July 7, 2010. .
Use of license
At the same time, other groups prefer dual licensing for their products. For example, older versions of the cURL library allowed the choice of using the Mozilla Public License or the MIT license.
According to the Free Software Foundation's list, the MIT license above is more correctly called the Expat license, since MIT has too many licenses under its name, and another is the X11 license. However, Expat calls the Expat license an MIT license, and they don’t have an X11 license at all, but they do have a similar X.Net license, which its authors abandoned.
Comparison with other licenses
The MIT License most closely matches the three-clause BSD License, differing only in the clause prohibiting use good name holder of copyright in advertising. The Four Clause BSD License also includes a similar clause requiring All promotional materials display this license as opposed to the MIT license. The latter also talks more explicitly about end user rights, including the rights to use, copy, modify, incorporate into other source code, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell the licensed software.
A two-clause, BSD-like license, like the Apple Computer WebCore license (though most WebCore is licensed under the LGPL) is also considered virtually identical to the MIT license, which does not include the "advertising" clause.
The license is considered an academic license, that is, it is recognized as suitable for use in the field of scientific development.
Write a review of the article "MIT License"
Notes
Literature
- Richard Stallman, trans. Sergey Korop.(6.10.1999). Retrieved July 7, 2010. .
- Richard Stallman.(English) . Various Licenses and Comments about Them. .
- Andrew M. St. Laurent.. - 2004. - 207 p.
Links
- Pavlov M.(Russian) . LicenseIt.ru. - Description and texts of licenses in Russian. Retrieved July 7, 2010. .
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Excerpt describing the MIT License
“Where there is court, there is no truth,” the little man interjected.- How long have you been here? – asked Pierre, chewing the last potato.
- Is that me? That Sunday they took me from the hospital in Moscow.
-Who are you, soldier?
- Soldiers of the Absheron Regiment. He was dying of fever. They didn't tell us anything. About twenty of us were lying there. And they didn’t think, they didn’t guess.
- Well, are you bored here? – asked Pierre.
- It’s not boring, falcon. Call me Plato; Karataev’s nickname,” he added, apparently in order to make it easier for Pierre to address him. - They called him Falcon in the service. How not to get bored, falcon! Moscow, she is the mother of cities. How not to get bored looking at this. Yes, the worm gnaws at the cabbage, but before that you disappear: that’s what the old men used to say,” he added quickly.
- How, how did you say that? – asked Pierre.
- Is that me? – asked Karataev. “I say: not by our mind, but by God’s judgment,” he said, thinking that he was repeating what had been said. And he immediately continued: “How come you, master, have estates?” And there is a house? Therefore, the cup is full! And is there a hostess? Are your old parents still alive? - he asked, and although Pierre could not see in the darkness, he felt that the soldier’s lips were wrinkled with a restrained smile of affection while he was asking this. He was apparently upset that Pierre did not have parents, especially a mother.
“A wife is for advice, a mother-in-law is for greetings, and nothing is dearer than your own mother!” - he said. - Well, do you have any children? – he continued to ask. Pierre's negative answer again apparently upset him, and he hastened to add: “Well, there will be young people, God willing.” If only I could live in the council...
“It doesn’t matter now,” Pierre said involuntarily.
“Oh, you dear man,” Plato objected. - Never give up money or prison. “He sat down better and cleared his throat, apparently preparing for a long story. “So, my dear friend, I was still living at home,” he began. “Our patrimony is rich, there is a lot of land, the men live well, and our home, thank God.” The priest himself went out to mow. We lived well. They were real Christians. It happened... - And Platon Karataev told long story about how he went to someone else's grove behind the forest and was caught by the guard, how he was whipped, tried and handed over to the soldiers. “Well, the falcon,” he said, his voice changing with a smile, “they thought grief, but joy!” My brother should go, if it were not for my sin. And the younger brother has five boys himself - and look, I have only one soldier left. There was a girl, and God took care of her even before she became a soldier. I came on leave, I’ll tell you. I see they live better than before. The yard is full of bellies, women are at home, two brothers are at work. Only Mikhailo, the youngest, is at home. Father says: “All children are equal to me: no matter what finger you bite, everything hurts. If only Plato hadn’t been shaved then, Mikhail would have gone.” He called us all - believe me - he put us in front of the image. Mikhailo, he says, come here, bow at his feet, and you, woman, bow, and your grandchildren bow. Got it? speaks. So, my dear friend. Rock is looking for his head. And we judge everything: sometimes it’s not good, sometimes it’s not okay. Our happiness, my friend, is like water in delirium: if you pull it, it swells, but if you pull it out, there’s nothing. So that. - And Plato sat down on his straw.
After being silent for some time, Plato stood up.
- Well, I have tea, do you want to sleep? - he said and quickly began to cross himself, saying:
- Lord Jesus Christ, Nikola the saint, Frola and Lavra, Lord Jesus Christ, Nikola the saint! Frol and Lavra, Lord Jesus Christ - have mercy and save us! - he concluded, bowed to the ground, stood up and, sighing, sat down on his straw. - That's it. “Put it down, God, like a pebble, lift it up like a ball,” he said and lay down, pulling on his greatcoat.
-What kind of prayer were you reading? – asked Pierre.
- Ass? - said Plato (he was already falling asleep). - Read what? I prayed to God. Don’t you ever pray?
“No, and I pray,” said Pierre. - But what did you say: Frol and Lavra?
“But what about,” Plato quickly answered, “a horse festival.” And we must feel sorry for the livestock,” Karataev said. - Look, the rogue has curled up. She got warm, the son of a bitch,” he said, feeling the dog at his feet, and, turning around again, immediately fell asleep.
Outside, crying and screams could be heard somewhere in the distance, and fire could be seen through the cracks of the booth; but in the booth it was quiet and dark. Pierre did not sleep for a long time and, with open eyes, lay in his place in the darkness, listening to the measured snoring of Plato, who lay next to him, and felt that the previously destroyed world was now being erected in his soul with new beauty, on some new and unshakable foundations.
In the booth into which Pierre entered and in which he stayed for four weeks, there were twenty-three captured soldiers, three officers and two officials.
All of them then appeared to Pierre as if in a fog, but Platon Karataev remained forever in Pierre’s soul as the strongest and dearest memory and personification of everything Russian, kind and round. When the next day, at dawn, Pierre saw his neighbor, the first impression of something round was completely confirmed: the whole figure of Plato in his French overcoat belted with a rope, in a cap and bast shoes, was round, his head was completely round, his back, chest, shoulders, even the hands that he carried, as if always about to hug something, were round; a pleasant smile and large brown gentle eyes were round.
Platon Karataev must have been over fifty years old, judging by his stories about the campaigns in which he participated as a long-time soldier. He himself did not know and could not determine in any way how old he was; but his teeth, bright white and strong, which kept rolling out in their two semicircles when he laughed (which he often did), were all good and intact; There was not a single gray hair in his beard or hair, and his whole body had the appearance of flexibility and, especially, hardness and endurance.
His face, despite the small round wrinkles, had an expression of innocence and youth; his voice was pleasant and melodious. But main feature his speech consisted of spontaneity and argument. He apparently never thought about what he said and what he would say; and because of this, the speed and fidelity of his intonations had a special irresistible persuasiveness.
His physical strength and agility were such during the first time of captivity that it seemed that he did not understand what fatigue and illness were. Every day, in the morning and in the evening, when he lay down, he said: “Lord, lay it down like a pebble, lift it up into a ball”; in the morning, getting up, always shrugging his shoulders in the same way, he said: “I lay down and curled up, got up and shook myself.” And indeed, as soon as he lay down, he immediately fell asleep like a stone, and as soon as he shook himself, he immediately, without a second of delay, took up some task, like children, getting up, taking up their toys. He knew how to do everything, not very well, but not badly either. He baked, steamed, sewed, planed, and made boots. He was always busy and only at night allowed himself conversations, which he loved, and songs. He sang songs, not as songwriters sing, who know that they are being listened to, but he sang like birds sing, obviously because he needed to make these sounds just as it is necessary to stretch or disperse; and these sounds were always subtle, gentle, almost feminine, mournful, and at the same time his face was very serious.
SLY_G September 25, 2016 at 07:24 pm
Line by line analysis of the MIT license
- Legislation in IT
- Translation
171 words that any programmer should understand
The MIT license is the most popular license for open source software. Here is one of her readings, with a line-by-line analysis.Reading the license
If you're an open source developer and haven't read this license in detail - and it's only 171 words long - you should. Especially if you don't deal with licenses on a daily basis. Mark anything you don't understand. And I will repeat all these words, in order and in pieces, along with context and comments. At the same time, it is important to imagine it as a whole.The MIT License (MIT)Copyright "year" "copyright holders"
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge , publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
MIT LicenseCopyright "year" "rights owners"
This license permits persons who obtain a copy of the software and accompanying documentation (hereinafter referred to as the “Software”) to use the Software without limitation, without limitation, including the unrestricted right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sale of copies of the Software, as well as to persons to whom this Software is provided, subject to the following conditions:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGE OR OTHER CLAIM, INCLUDING WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE OR OTHERWISE. WITH SOFTWARE.
The license is divided into five paragraphs, but is logically divided as follows:
- Heading
- Name
- Copyright
- Permission
- Scope
- Conditions
- Transfer of license
- Disclaimer of Warranties
- Disclaimer
Heading
Name
The "MIT License" is not one license, but a family of licensing forms influenced by the style adopted in products produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has changed frequently over the years, both for the projects that originally used it and as a model for other projects. The Fedora Project maintains an archive of interesting license options, with license options stored in plain text, as if anatomical wonders in formaldehyde, demonstrating the course of evolution.
Fortunately, the open source initiative Open Source Initiative and the Software Package Data eXchange group have standardized the general form of the MIT license and called it “The MIT License.” OSI has adopted string identifiers for common open source licenses from SPDX, and the acronym MIT explicitly implies "MIT license." If you need to distribute your product under MIT terms, use the standard MIT license form.
But even if you include the lines “The MIT License” or “SPDX:MIT” in your LICENSE file, a responsible reader will check your text against the standard form, just to be on the safe side. A lot of different forms licenses call themselves the “MIT License”, although they differ in details, and due to the overly vague concept of the “MIT License”, many authors cannot resist the temptation to add something of their own to the text. The canonical example of such a bad, terrible, disgusting change is the JSON license, which adds "The program must be used for good purposes, not bad purposes" to the MIT license. This trick is very much in the spirit of Crockford. Terrible headache. Maybe it's a mockery of lawyers. They laughed all the way to the bank.
The moral is: simply writing “MIT license” is ambiguous. People will generally understand what you meant, but you'll just save everyone, and yourself, time by copying the text of the MIT Standard License into your project.
Copyright
Copyright<год> <владельцы прав>
Before the Copyright Act of 1976 was enacted in the United States, special steps, “formal requirements,” were required to ensure the survival of a copyright. And if you didn't follow them, your right to sue for illegal use of your work was limited and sometimes even gone. One of the formal requirements was the so-called. “notification”: placing marks on your work, and other actions necessary to notify the market of a rights claim. The icon is the standard symbol for this. ASCII did not have such an icon, so a combination was used for the same purpose.
The Copyright Act 1976 removed the need for formalities. In the US, rights holders are still required to register their works before legal proceedings, but in practice this is done directly before the court itself. You will not lose copyright if you simply forgot to declare it, register it, send a copy to the Library of Congress, etc.
But even if these statements are no longer required, they are still quite useful. By indicating the year in which a certain work was made and the rights to it, you can immediately make it clear when these rights expire and the work becomes public domain. Author identities are also useful - in the US, laws treat individual authors and groups of authors differently. In business, a company will think twice before using software from its rival, even if the license allows it. If you hope that others will notice your work and want to license it from you, information about the copyright holder will also be useful.
There is not a place for the copyright owner in all licenses. More modern licenses, such as Apache 2.0 and GPL 3.0, publish LICENSE texts that must be copied verbatim, and then the owners of the work must be indicated in comments and separate files. This approach eliminates changes to license texts and simplifies their automatic processing.
The MIT license comes from code releases performed by various institutions. For such releases, the owner of the rights was only the institute releasing the code. Other institutions adopted these licenses, replacing MIT with their own names, which led to the existence of the licenses general view. Other licenses have undergone this process, such as the BSD License from the University of California, which was originally a four-clause license but is now used in three- and two-clause variants, and The ISC License for the Internet Systems Consortium, a variant of the MIT license.
In each case, the organization identified itself as the owner of the rights, and took advantage of “work for hire” capabilities, which allowed it to retain the rights to work performed by employees and contractors. These rules generally do not apply to work that employees and contractors perform on their own initiative. They also do not apply to distributed groups of people working together who volunteer their code. For foundations that manage projects like the Apache Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation, which accept code from a variety of sources, this presents a problem. Funds have typically dealt with this by using a house license that claims a single rights holder—Apache CLA and Eclipse CLA—to obtain rights from funders. Collecting rights in one place is even more important for all kinds of “copyleft” licenses, such as the GPL, which shift the responsibility for disseminating the values of free software to the copyright owners.
Today, many projects, even those that do not manage multiple code vendors, use MIT licenses. SPDX and OSI contributed to this by standardizing license forms that do not refer to a specific person or group of persons holding rights. As a result, most authors simply write their name in the copyright notice, and sometimes also include the year.
The original owner of the code retains rights to their work. But while MIT-like licenses give others the rights to build on and change the software, creating what is called a “derivative work,” they do not give the original author the ability to own what other people have created. Everyone who contributed retains the rights to their part of the work carried out on the basis of the existing code.
Most projects do not bother to get participants to agree to the license, let alone sign documents on the distribution of rights. This is naive, but understandable. Despite the assumption of developers that by sending pull requests to GitHub, they automatically receive certain rights to distribute the project according to the letter of the license, there are no such rules in the United States. The default is copyright protection rather than license transfer permissions.
To bridge the gap between legalized and documented transfers of rights and the absence of any paperwork, some projects accept Developer's Certificate of Origin, a standard statement that developers refer to using Signed-Off-By meta tags. DCO was designed to develop Linux kernels, which came out of the Unix kernel owned by SCO. DCO does a good job of documenting the process by which each line of Linux came to be through the people who contributed to it. While this is not a license, it does provide a lot of good evidence that those who submitted their code to the project intended that it would be distributed with the project, and that users would use it under the existing kernel license. Also supported with the core is a human-readable CREDITS file, which lists all the people who contributed, with names, memberships, scope of contributions, and other data.
Permission
This license permits persons who obtain a copy of this software and accompanying documentation (hereinafter referred to as the “Software”) to
The point of the MIT license is that it is, as you might have guessed, a license. In general, a license is a permission that one person or entity– licensor – allows another – the licensee – to do something that might otherwise be challenged in court. The MIT license is a promise not to sue.
Sometimes the law separates a license and a promise in the transfer of a license. If someone breaks their promise to give you a license, you can sue them for breaking their promise, but you may never get the license. In this sentence [ in the English version, the archaism “hereby” is used for this - approx. translation] clarifies that the text of this license itself already gives you a license, and not just a promise to transfer it.
And while many licenses give permission for a specific named license, the MIT license is a “public license.” Public licenses give permission to everyone, i.e. – to society. This is one of the three great ideas behind open source licenses. The MIT License takes advantage of this idea by offering a license to all "persons who obtain a copy of the software."
Designation of the concept in brackets and quotation marks (“Definition”) – standard way giving terms a certain meaning in legal documents. The parties will be able to use these terms in court proceedings.
Scope
use the Software free of charge without restrictions,
These words, from the licensee's point of view, are the most important of all the words in the MIT license. The main problems associated with rights are the possibility of being prosecuted for copyright infringement and patent infringement. None of these areas of law use the words “free use.” As a result, the court will certainly ask what is meant by this definition. The court will find that this description is deliberately too broad and open-ended. It enables the licensee to resist any claim by the licensor that the authorization for any specific use he did not provide software.
including the unrestricted right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell copies of the Software, as well as to persons to whom the Software is provided,
There are no perfect legal texts that are completely unambiguous or completely understandable. Don't believe it if someone tells you otherwise. This part of the license is the least advanced.
First, “including unlimited right” is an example of how not to write legal texts. There are variations of this formulation:
- including, without limitation;
- including, without limitation, generalizations of the above;
- including but not limited to;
They are all written for one purpose, and none of them achieve it. The lawyers who use them want to eat the fish and not run aground. In the MIT license, they mean an attempt to provide certain examples of "use of the software" - "use, copy, modify," etc. - without implying that the software can only be used in one of the listed ways. The problem is that if such a license is presented in court, then the court will have to determine the meaning of these terms in order to understand the license. If the court wants to understand what it means to “use the software,” it will not be able to “unsee” the examples of use specified in the license. I would say that it is best to write in the license “to use the software without restrictions.” It's also shorter.
Secondly, the terms listed are a mishmash. Some of these are covered by copyright and patent laws, and some are not.
- use found in the Code of the United States of America, Article 35, paragraph 271 (a) in the list of things for which the latter can sue without the permission of the patent holder
- copy found in the Code, Article 17, paragraph 106, in the list of copyright law
- change, publish, merge does not appear in either copyright or patent law.
- distribute found in copyright law.
- sublicense- This general term intellectual property law. It means the right for others to give away their own licenses for partial or full list what you allow them to do. This clause is unusual for open licenses. The normal approach is direct, when everyone who receives a copy of the software also receives a license directly from the owner.
- sell- a hybrid word. It is similar to the sales mentioned in patent law, but refers to the sale of copies, as in copyright law. In copyright terms it is closer to "distribution", but copyright law does not mention sales.
- as well as persons to whom this Software is provided– this phrase seems like an unnecessary repetition of “sublicensing”. It is also not needed insofar as people receiving copies of the software immediately receive a license.
Three license conditions
subject to the following conditions
There is always a catch - and MIT even has three of them!
If you do not comply with the conditions, you will not receive permission. Therefore, theoretically, in this case you could be sued, most likely under copyright law.
Using the value of the software to motivate the licensee to comply even though he did not pay for the license is the second great idea of open source software. The latter, which was not included in the MIT license, is based on license conditions—licenses like the GNU Public License use conditions to control how changers can license and distribute modified versions.
Transfer of license
The above copyright notice and these terms and conditions must be included in all copies or significant portions of the Software.
If you give someone a copy of the software, you must include the license text in it, and you may add any copyright notices. This serves several purposes:
- Tells others that they have permissions for public license software. This key feature Models with the issuance of licenses directly, when each user receives a license directly from the rights holder.
- Gives an idea about the author of the software, so that it is clear who needs to be showered with compliments, fame and donations.
- Provides disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability.
These conditions, unfortunately, are poorly met. Almost every open source license has such terms. Creators of system and installable software often realize that they need to display a file with license information on the screen, and include copies of the license in libraries and components. Funds that manage projects teach these practices. But web developers apparently weren't notified. There is no forgiveness for them.
Disclaimer of Warranties
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
Almost all US states are required by law to follow a version of the Uniform Commercial Code, a set of laws governing commercial transactions. Article 2 of the UCC deals with contracts for the sale of goods, from used cars purchased at auction to the supply of industrial chemicals to factories.
Certain UCC rules are mandatory and always apply. Others only describe the “default” state - unless the sellers and buyers write something different in the agreement. Among these “default” rules are guarantees, that is, promises from sellers to buyers regarding the quality and fitness for use of products.
There is debate about whether public licenses like MIT are contracts—agreements to which licensees and licensors can be forced—or simply licenses that can have conditions attached to them. There is a little less debate about whether software is a product, and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the UCC. But licensors have no dispute about liability: no one wants to be sued if the software they distribute breaks, causes problems, does not work, or otherwise manifests itself negatively. This is exactly the opposite of what the three default guarantee rules describe:
- Merchantability, according to section 2-314, is a promise that the product - the software - will be of at least average quality, suitably packaged and labeled, and fit for purpose. normal use. This rule applies only to software dealers - that is, to those who sell them and who consider themselves to be specialists in this field.
- Fitness for a particular purpose, under section 2-315, applies when the seller knows that the buyer expects the goods to be fit for a particular purpose.
- No Patent Impediment – Not included in the UCC, but commonly used in contract laws. It protects the buyer in the event that the purchased product is found to infringe someone else's intellectual rights.
Lawyers have long been mistaken that by writing text in CAPITAL LETTERS, they meet the requirement of conspicuity. This is wrong. Capital letters often push the reader away instead of attracting their attention. But most open source licenses write this part in capitals because it is the most obvious way make text in simple text files standing out. I would have preferred to use asterisks or other ASCII art, but that train has already left.
Disclaimer
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGE OR OTHER CLAIM, INCLUDING WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE OR OTHERWISE. WITH SOFTWARE.
The MIT license gives away software for free, but the law does not imply that those who receive free license people lose their rights to a trial if something goes wrong and the licensor is found guilty. Limitations of liability, like licenses, also serve as promises not to go to court - only in this case they protect licensors from licensees.
Typically, courts will read disclaimers of warranties carefully because it can help shift risk from one party to the other. To give the people the opportunity to defend themselves, in every possible case, the courts will interpret these waivers against the person they are protecting. Often courts refuse to take them into account if such conditions are located somewhere deep in the contract and are not highlighted. Therefore, lawyers are accustomed to writing them in capital letters.
The limitation of liability, among other things, also limits the amount of money for which the licensee can be sued. For open licenses this limit is always zero. Commercial licenses often include amounts that are multiples of the license fees paid in the last 12 months.
This section lists those types of legal pursuits that the licensor may not use. Like many legal forms, this license mentions breaches of contract and torts. The rules of torts refer to the commission of acts that give rise to damages. If you run over someone on the road while texting, you have committed a tort. If your company sold defective headphones that burned people's ears, it has committed a tort. If the contract does not explicitly exclude tort claims, courts will sometimes take advantage of it. The MIT license states "by other requirements" to exclude any exotic requirements.
Phrase " ARISING FROM THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE OR OTHER ACTIONS WITH THE SOFTWARE" is a nervous tic characteristic of a lawyer’s acquired fear for his safety. The point is that any claim related to this software is covered by limitations and exceptions. However, the use of the software is fully included in “other actions” with the software. [ the original license specifies three options for events “arising from”, “in connection with”, “use” - that is, “arising from”, “in connection with” and “when using”, which, in fact, duplicate each other, which causes complaints from the author of the article - approx. translation] However, such language is used in millions of other licenses.
Conclusion
But all these claims are not too great. The MIT license is a legal classic. She works. It is not a panacea for all software ills, in particular patent disputes. But such licenses have served well, and serve a specific purpose - the abolition of inconvenient default rules in copyright, sales and contracts - with minimum set legal instruments. In the context computer topics her vitality is amazing. It has outlived and will outlive most of the software that was licensed under it. One can only guess how many decades it will continue to work. This is especially beneficial for those who cannot afford to hire lawyers.We have seen that the MIT license is a set of defined and standardized definitions that brings order to the chaos of the random variations of licenses adopted by different organizations.
We saw how her approach to attribution and copyright issues influences the practice of property rights management in academic and commercial organizations.
open by Add tags
The MIT license is the most popular license for open source software. Here is one of her readings, with a line-by-line analysis.
Reading the license
If you're an open source developer and haven't read this license in detail - and it's only 171 words long - you should. Especially if you don't deal with licenses on a daily basis. Mark anything you don't understand. And I will repeat all these words, in order and in pieces, along with context and comments. At the same time, it is important to imagine it as a whole.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
MIT License
Copyright<год> <владельцы прав>
This license permits persons who obtain a copy of the software and accompanying documentation (hereinafter referred to as the “Software”) to use the Software without limitation, without limitation, including the unrestricted right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sale of copies of the Software, as well as to persons to whom this Software is provided, subject to the following conditions:
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGE OR OTHER CLAIM, INCLUDING WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE OR OTHERWISE. WITH SOFTWARE.
The license is divided into five paragraphs, but is logically divided as follows:
- Heading
- Name
- Copyright
- Permission
- Scope
- Conditions
- Transfer of license
- Disclaimer of Warranties
- Disclaimer
Heading
Name
MIT License
The "MIT License" is not one license, but a family of licensing forms influenced by the style adopted in products produced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has changed frequently over the years, both for the projects that originally used it and as a model for other projects. The Fedora Project maintains an archive of interesting license options, with license options stored in plain text, like anatomical curiosities in formaldehyde, demonstrating the progress of evolution.
Fortunately, the Open Source Initiative and the Software Package Data eXchange group have standardized the general form of the MIT license and call it “The MIT License.” OSI has adopted string identifiers for common open source licenses from SPDX, and the acronym MIT explicitly implies "MIT license." If you need to distribute your product under MIT terms, use the standard MIT license form.
But even if you include the lines “The MIT License” or “SPDX:MIT” in your LICENSE file, a responsible reader will check your text against the standard form, just to be on the safe side. Many different forms of licenses call themselves the “MIT License,” but differ in the details, and due to the overly vague concept of the “MIT License,” many authors have been tempted to add their own twist to the text. The canonical example of such a bad, terrible, disgusting change is the JSON license, which adds "The program must be used for good purposes, not bad purposes" to the MIT license. This trick is very much in the spirit of Crockford. Terrible headache. Maybe it's a mockery of lawyers. They laughed all the way to the bank.
The moral is: simply writing “MIT license” is ambiguous. People will generally understand what you meant, but you'll just save everyone, and yourself, time by copying the text of the MIT Standard License into your project.
Copyright
Copyright<год> <владельцы прав>
Before the Copyright Act of 1976 was enacted in the United States, special steps, “formal requirements,” were required to ensure the survival of a copyright. And if you didn't follow them, your right to sue for illegal use of your work was limited and sometimes even gone. One of the formal requirements was the so-called. “notification”: placing marks on your work, and other actions necessary to notify the market of a rights claim. The icon is the standard symbol for this. ASCII did not have such an icon, so a combination was used for the same purpose.
The Copyright Act 1976 removed the need for formalities. In the US, rights holders are still required to register their works before legal proceedings, but in practice this is done directly before the court itself. You will not lose copyright if you simply forgot to declare it, register it, send a copy to the Library of Congress, etc.
But even if these statements are no longer required, they are still quite useful. By indicating the year in which a certain work was made and the rights to it, you can immediately make it clear when these rights expire and the work becomes public domain. Author identities are also useful - in the US, laws treat individual authors and groups of authors differently. In business, a company will think twice before using software from its rival, even if the license allows it. If you hope that others will notice your work and want to license it from you, information about the copyright holder will also be useful.
There is not a place for the copyright owner in all licenses. More modern licenses, such as Apache 2.0 and GPL 3.0, publish LICENSE texts that must be copied verbatim, and then the owners of the work must be indicated in comments and separate files. This approach eliminates changes to license texts and simplifies their automatic processing.
The MIT license comes from code releases performed by various institutions. For such releases, the owner of the rights was only the institute releasing the code. Other institutions adopted these licenses, replacing MIT with their own names, which led to the existence of generic licenses. Other licenses have undergone this process, such as the BSD License from the University of California, which was originally a four-clause license but is now used in three- and two-clause variants, and The ISC License for the Internet Systems Consortium, a variant of the MIT license.
In each case, the organization identified itself as the owner of the rights, and took advantage of “work for hire” capabilities, which allowed it to retain the rights to work performed by employees and contractors. These rules generally do not apply to work that employees and contractors perform on their own initiative. They also do not apply to distributed groups of people working together who volunteer their code. For foundations that manage projects like the Apache Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation, which accept code from a variety of sources, this presents a problem. Funds have typically dealt with this by using a house license that claims a single rights holder—Apache CLA and Eclipse CLA—to obtain rights from funders. Collecting rights in one place is even more important for all kinds of “copyleft” licenses, such as the GPL, which shift the responsibility for disseminating the values of free software to the copyright owners.
Today, many projects, even those that do not manage multiple code vendors, use MIT licenses. SPDX and OSI contributed to this by standardizing license forms that do not refer to a specific person or group of persons holding rights. As a result, most authors simply write their name in the copyright notice, and sometimes also include the year.
The original owner of the code retains rights to their work. But while MIT-like licenses give others the rights to build on and change the software, creating what is called a “derivative work,” they do not give the original author the ability to own what other people have created. Everyone who contributed retains the rights to their part of the work carried out on the basis of the existing code.
Most projects do not bother to get participants to agree to the license, let alone sign documents on the distribution of rights. This is naive, but understandable. Despite the assumption of developers that by sending pull requests to GitHub, they automatically receive certain rights to distribute the project according to the letter of the license, there are no such rules in the United States. The default is copyright protection rather than license transfer permissions.
To bridge the gap between legalized and documented transfers of rights and the absence of any paperwork, some projects accept Developer's Certificate of Origin, a standard statement that developers refer to using Signed-Off-By meta tags. DCO was designed to develop a Linux kernel that evolved from the Unix kernel owned by SCO. DCO does a good job of documenting the process by which each line of Linux came into existence through the people who contributed to it. And while it's not a license, it does provide a lot of good evidence that. those who submitted their code to the project intended that it would be distributed with the project, and that users would use it under the existing kernel license. Also with the kernel, a human-readable CREDITS file is maintained, which lists all the people who contributed. , with names, memberships, area of contribution and other data.
Permission
This license permits persons who obtain a copy of this software and accompanying documentation (hereinafter referred to as the “Software”) to
The point of the MIT license is that it is, as you might have guessed, a license. In general, a license is a permission that one person or entity - the licensor - allows another - the licensee - to do something that might otherwise be challenged in court. The MIT license is a promise not to sue.
Sometimes the law separates a license and a promise in the transfer of a license. If someone breaks their promise to give you a license, you can sue them for breaking their promise, but you may never get the license. In this sentence [ in the English version, the archaism “hereby” is used for this - approx. translation] clarifies that the text of this license itself already gives you a license, and not just a promise to transfer it.
And while many licenses give permission for a specific named license, the MIT license is a “public license.” Public licenses give permission to everyone, i.e. – to society. This is one of the three great ideas behind open source licenses. The MIT License takes advantage of this idea by offering a license to all "persons who obtain a copy of the software."
Identification of a concept in parentheses and quotation marks (“Definition”) is a standard way of giving terms a specific meaning in legal documents. The parties will be able to use these terms in court proceedings.
Scope
use the Software free of charge without restrictions,
These words, from the licensee's point of view, are the most important of all the words in the MIT license. The main problems associated with rights are the possibility of being prosecuted for copyright infringement and patent infringement. None of these areas of law use the words “free use.” As a result, the court will necessarily ask what is meant by this definition. The court will find that this description is deliberately too broad and open-ended. It allows the licensee to resist any claims by the licensor that he did not give permission for a particular use of the software.
including the unrestricted right to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell copies of the Software, as well as to persons to whom the Software is provided,
There are no perfect legal texts that are completely unambiguous or completely understandable. Don't believe it if anyone tells you otherwise. This part of the license is the least advanced.
First, “including unlimited right” is an example of how not to write legal texts. There are variations of this formulation:
including, without limitation;
including, without limitation, generalizations of the above;
including but not limited to;And others.
They are all written for one purpose, and none of them achieve it. The lawyers who use them want to eat the fish and not run aground. In the MIT license, they mean an attempt to provide certain examples of "use of the software" - "use, copy, modify," etc. - without implying that the software can only be used in one of the listed ways. The problem is that if such a license is presented in court, then the court will have to determine the meaning of these terms in order to understand the license. If the court wants to understand what it means to “use the software,” it will not be able to “unsee” the examples of use specified in the license. I would say that it is best to write in the license “to use the software without restrictions.” It's also shorter.
Secondly, the terms listed are a mishmash. Some of these are covered by copyright and patent laws, and some are not.
use found in the Code of the United States of America, Article 35, paragraph 271 (a) in the list of things for which the latter can sue without the permission of the patent holder
copy found in the Code, Article 17, paragraph 106, in the list of copyright law
change, publish, merge does not appear in either copyright or patent law.
distribute found in copyright law.
sublicense is a general term for intellectual property law. It means the right for others to give away their own licenses for part or all of what you allow them to do. This clause is unusual for open licenses. The normal approach is direct, when everyone who receives a copy of the software also receives a license directly from the owner.
sell- a hybrid word. It is similar to the sales mentioned in patent law, but refers to the sale of copies, as in copyright law. In copyright terms it is closer to "distribution", but copyright law does not mention sales.
as well as persons to whom this Software is provided– this phrase seems like an unnecessary repetition of “sublicensing”. It is also not needed insofar as people receiving copies of the software immediately receive a license.Finally, because of this mixture of legal, manufacturing, intellectual property, and common language, it is unclear whether the MIT license includes patent permission. “Use” alludes to patents, although it is not very clear. The fact that the license comes from the copyright owner, who may or may not have patent rights to the software, as well as most of the example verbs used and the definition of the software itself, indicate a copyright license. Newer licenses, like Apache 2.0, specifically and explicitly mention copyright, patents, and even trademarks.
Three license conditions
subject to the following conditions
There is always a catch - and MIT even has three of them!
If you do not comply with the conditions, you will not receive permission. Therefore, theoretically, in this case you could be sued, most likely under copyright law.
Using the value of the software to motivate the licensee to comply even though he did not pay for the license is the second great idea of open source software. The latter, which was not included in the MIT license, is based on license conditions—licenses like the GNU Public License use conditions to control how changers can license and distribute modified versions.
Transfer of license
If you give someone a copy of the software, you must include the license text in it, and you may add any copyright notices. This serves several purposes:
1. Tells others that they have permissions for the public license software. This is a key feature of direct licensing models, where each user receives a license directly from the rights holder.
2. Gives an idea about the author of the software, so that it is clear who needs to be showered with compliments, fame and donations.
3. Provides disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability.No one is stopping you from charging money to distribute copies, or even making copies in compiled form, without source code. But in this case, you cannot pretend that the code belongs to you, or is under some other license. Recipients of the product should be aware of their "public license" rights.
These conditions, unfortunately, are poorly met. Almost every open source license has such terms. Creators of system and installable software often realize that they need to display a file with license information on the screen, and include copies of the license in libraries and components. Funds that manage projects teach these practices. But web developers apparently weren't notified. There is no forgiveness for them.
Disclaimer of Warranties
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
Almost all US states are required by law to follow a version of the Uniform Commercial Code, a set of laws governing commercial transactions. Article 2 of the UCC deals with contracts for the sale of goods, from used cars purchased at auction to the supply of industrial chemicals to factories.
Certain UCC rules are mandatory and always apply. Others only describe the “default” state - unless the sellers and buyers write something different in the agreement. Among these “default” rules are guarantees, that is, promises from sellers to buyers regarding the quality and fitness for use of products.
There is debate about whether public licenses like MIT are contracts—agreements to which licensees and licensors can be forced—or simply licenses that can have conditions attached to them. There is a little less debate about whether software is a product, and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the UCC. But licensors have no dispute about liability: no one wants to be sued if the software they distribute breaks, causes problems, does not work, or otherwise manifests itself negatively. This is exactly the opposite of what the three default guarantee rules describe:
1. Merchantability, according to section 2-314, is a promise that the product - the software - will be of at least average quality, properly packaged and labeled, and fit for ordinary use. This rule applies only to software dealers - that is, to those who sell them and who consider themselves to be specialists in this field.
2. Fitness for a particular purpose, as defined in section 2-315, applies when the seller knows that the buyer expects the goods to be fit for a particular purpose.
3. No patent impediment - not included in the UCC, but commonly used in contract laws. It protects the buyer in the event that the purchased product is found to infringe someone else's intellectual rights.Section 2-316(3) requires that license language that excludes these warranties do so in a conspicuous manner—that is, in a conspicuous manner rather than hidden in fine print on the last page of the contract. State laws may require the same for declarations of absence of patent barriers.
Lawyers have long been mistaken that by writing text in CAPITAL LETTERS, they meet the requirement of conspicuity. This is wrong. Capital letters often push the reader away instead of attracting their attention. But most open source licenses put this part in capitals because it's the most obvious way to make text in plain text files stand out. I would have preferred to use asterisks or other ASCII art, but that train has already left.
Disclaimer
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGE OR OTHER CLAIM, INCLUDING WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE OR OTHERWISE. WITH SOFTWARE.
The MIT license gives away software for free, but the law does not mean that people receiving a free license lose their rights to a trial if something goes wrong and the licensor is found guilty. Limitations of liability, like licenses, also serve as promises not to go to court - only in this case they protect licensors from licensees.
Typically, courts will read disclaimers of warranties carefully because it can help shift risk from one party to the other. To give the people the opportunity to defend themselves, in every possible case, the courts will interpret these waivers against the person they are protecting. Often courts refuse to take them into account if such conditions are located somewhere deep in the contract and are not highlighted. Therefore, lawyers are accustomed to writing them in capital letters.
The limitation of liability, among other things, also limits the amount of money for which the licensee can be sued. For open licenses this limit is always zero. Commercial licenses often include amounts that are multiples of the license fees paid in the last 12 months.
This section lists those types of legal pursuits that the licensor may not use. Like many legal forms, this license mentions breaches of contract and torts. The rules of torts refer to the commission of acts that give rise to damages. If you run over someone on the road while texting, you have committed a tort. If your company sold defective headphones that burned people's ears, it has committed a tort. If the contract does not explicitly exclude tort claims, courts will sometimes take advantage of it. The MIT license states "by other requirements" to exclude any exotic requirements.
Phrase " ARISING FROM THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE OR OTHER ACTIONS WITH THE SOFTWARE" is a nervous tic characteristic of a lawyer’s acquired fear for his safety. The point is that any claim related to this software is covered by limitations and exceptions. However, the use of the software is fully included in “other actions” with the software. [ the original license specifies three options for events “arising from”, “in connection with”, “use” - that is, “arising from”, “in connection with” and “when using”, which, in fact, duplicate each other, which causes complaints from the author of the article - approx. translation] However, such language is used in millions of other licenses.
Conclusion
But all these claims are not too great. The MIT license is a legal classic. She works. It is not a panacea for all software ills, in particular patent disputes. But such licenses have served well, and serve a specific purpose - the abolition of inconvenient default rules in copyright, sales and contracts - with a minimal set of legal tools. In the context of computer topics, its vitality is amazing. It has outlived and will outlive most of the software that was licensed under it. One can only guess how many decades it will continue to work. This is especially beneficial for those who cannot afford to hire lawyers.
We have seen that the MIT license is a set of defined and standardized definitions that brings order to the chaos of the random variations of licenses adopted by different organizations.
We saw how it gives the rights to software to everyone, free of charge, under conditions that protect licensors from guarantees and liability.
We saw that, despite the slightly clumsy verbosity and legal mannerisms, these 171 words do a huge amount of legal work and clear the way for software with open source through the thick bushes of intellectual property and contracts.
4 answers
It seems to me that the main difference between the MIT license and the GPL is that the MIT does not require changes to be open source, whereas the GPL does.
True - in general. You don't have to open-source your changes if you're using the GPL. You can modify it and use it for your own purposes as long as you don't distribute it. BUT... if you distribute it, then your entire project using GPL code will automatically become GPL as well. This means that it must be open source and the recipient gets all the same rights as you, meaning they can turn around and redistribute it, modify it, sell it, etc. And this will include your own code which then will no longer be proprietary - it becomes open source source code.
The difference with MIT is that even if you do distribute your proprietary code that uses license code MIT, you don't have to create open source code. You can distribute it like closed application, where the code is encrypted or binary. An MIT license code inclusion may be encrypted if it carries an MIT license notice.
is the GPL more restrictive than the MIT license?
Yes very.
Can GPL licensed code be included in an MIT licensed product?
You can. GPL is free software, as well as MIT, both licenses do not restrict you to code bundling, where "include" is always two-way.
So, if you include GPL licensed code in an MIT licensed product, you will simultaneously include licensed product MIT to GPL licensed code.
You are right that the GPL is more restrictive than the MIT license.
You may not include GPL code in an MIT licensed product. If you distribute a combined work that combines GPL and MIT code (except in some specific situations, such as "simple aggregation"), that distribution must comply with the GPL.
You can include MIT licensed code in a GPL product. All combined work must be distributed in accordance with the GPL. If you have made changes to parts of MIT code, you will need to publish the source of those changes if you distribute an application that contains GPL and MIT code.