Item — HN Reader

Two Views of MIT-Style Licenses:

1. MIT-style licenses are "do what you want" as long as you provide a single line of attribution. Including building big closed source business around it.

2. MIT-style licenses are "do what you want" under the law, but they carry moral, GPL-like obligations to think about the "community."

To my knowledge Georgi Gerganov, the creator of llama.cpp, has only complained about attribution when it was missing. As an open-source developer, he selected a permissive license and has not complained about other issues, only the lack of credit. It seems he treats the MIT license as the first kind.

The article has other good points not related to licensing that are good to know. Like performance issues and simplicity that makes me consider llama.cpp.

2 comments

The second interpretation is nonsense of course. If you want GPL-like obligations, use the GPL.

A license is what it says in the license, nothing extra. It's a legal document not a moral guideline.

I do think it's a very good idea to always use the GPL (even though commercially minded types always get their panties in a bunch about the GPL) for any user-facing software, to force everybody to 'play fair and share'. The only reason to use MIT imho is for a library implementing some sort of standard where you want that standard used by as many people as possible.

I don't understand people who use MIT for their project and then complain some commercial firm takes their contributions and runs with it. If that's not what you want don't use that license.

Apart from license terms and moral obligations being a bad mix, companies don't have morals. Don't get me wrong, I think they should have! But they don't.

People have morals. Groups of people (a company, a country , a mob) not so much. Sadly.

MIT license lets you do what you want with the code. That's the deal. The blob storage thing is the real problem though. Nobody talks about it until they try to move their models somewhere else.

Well, yeah, which is why it's silly when people use MIT licenses and then complain that those, for example, with the motto "Build > ask. Disrupt or die.", only take and don't contribute anything back, instead of using a license that demands it.

exactly

Georgi could have switched to GPL whenever he wanted. He didn't. That's the answer. The loudest voices here aren't the ones writing the code. Meanwhile both projects kept shipping and users got more options. Hard to see the harm.