Comment by donatj
4 months ago
I regret using the MIT License on a couple of my applications that others have picked up and monetized.
I do not regret making their source available for people to learn from and extend. I'm not even mad they're making money. I just would have liked, in hindsight, to have used a license that guaranteed me some iota of credit in the finished product. Particularly in things where I built the entire finished product - that is to say applications, not libraries.
MIT is fine and good for libraries, but full blown tools where I built the actual UI, and people aren't even extending it but are just re-hosting it and in some cases claiming they created it? I should have used something else.
I wrote a post about it that got picked up by certain types and used as an argument against open source generally. That interpretation is almost as frustrating as the situation with the licenses, and isn't what I was attempting to say at all!
I love open source, I love the MIT license. I just think it makes more sense for me to use on libraries than finished applications.
The MIT license does require attribution, in the form of the copyright notice, which must be included in all copies of the code, including ones built into a binary.
Even if you had made it AGPL, people deliberately violate that all the time, and usually the only recourse is enforcement through costly lawsuits.