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Line analysis of the license MIT

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 line-by-line analysis.

We read the license


If you are developing open source software, and have not read this license in detail - and it consists of only 171 words - you need to do this. Especially if you do not deal with licenses on a daily basis. Check all that you do not understand. And I will repeat all these words, in order and in pieces, along with the context and comments. At the same time it is important to imagine it entirely.

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright © "year" "copyright holders"
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This is a scam for a person. If you are not a subject of the following conditions:

This is a copyright notice.

IS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED, IS WITHOUT, INCLUDING, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. ORDER CONSULTANCY, ORAINTHROWISE, ORTHERWISE, ORTHERWISE SOFTWARE.

MIT License

Copyright © "year" "rights holders"

This license permits those who receive a copy of this software and related documentation (hereinafter referred to as the “Software”) to use the Software free of charge without restrictions, 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 who provide this Software, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and these terms and conditions must be included in all copies or significant parts of this Software.

THIS SOFTWARE, SOFTWARE, CURRENT OTHER CONDITIONS IN ORDER OF ANYTHING

The license is divided into five sections, but logically divided as follows:


Go.

Headline


Title


MIT License

“MIT License” is not a single license, but a family of license forms formed under the influence of the style adopted in the products manufactured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the years, it has often changed, as with those projects that used it initially, 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, showing the course of evolution.

Fortunately, the open source initiative of the Open Source Initiative and the Software Package Data eXchange group standardized the general view of the MIT license and called it “The MIT License”. OSI has adopted string identifiers for commonly used open source licenses from SPDX, and the abbreviation MIT explicitly implies the MIT license. If you need to distribute your product on MIT terms, use the standard MIT license form.

But even if you include the lines “The MIT License” or “SPDX: MIT” in the LICENSE file, the responsible reader will check your text with the standard form, just for backend. Many different forms of licenses call themselves “MIT License”, differing in details, and due to the vagueness of the concept “MIT license”, many authors did not resist the temptation to add something from themselves to the text. A canonical example of such a bad, terrible, disgusting change is the JSON license, in which the program must be used with good MIT, not bad, goals. This trick is quite 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: just to write "MIT license" will be ambiguous. The people basically understand what you meant, but you just save time to everyone, and yourself, by copying the text of the standard MIT license into your project.

Copyright


Copyright © <year> <rights holders>

Prior to the entry into force of the Copyright Act of 1976, special actions, "formal requirements", were required in the United States to ensure the preservation of copyright. And if you did not follow them, your right to sue for the illegal use of your work was limited, and sometimes disappeared altogether. One of the formal requirements was the so-called. "Notification": placing marks on your work, and other actions necessary to notify the market about the application for rights. The icon is the standard symbol for this. There was no such icon in ASCII, so the combination © was used for the same purpose.

The Copyright Act of 1976 eliminated the need for formalities. In the USA, rights holders still need to register their work before legal proceedings, but in practice this is done directly before the court itself. You will not lose your copyright if you simply forgot to declare, register, send a copy to the Library of Congress, etc.

But even if these statements are no longer required, they are still quite useful. By marking the year in which some work was done and the rights to it, you can immediately make it clear when these rights will expire and the work will be in the public domain. The identity of the authors are also useful - in the US, laws are differently related to individual authors and groups of authors. In business, the 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 will want to get a license from you, information about the copyright holder will also be useful.

For copyright owner, there is not a place in all licenses. More modern licenses, such as Apache 2.0 and GPL 3.0, publish LICENSE texts, which need to be literally copied, and then in the comments and separate files you can specify the owners of the work. This approach eliminates the modification of license texts and simplifies their automatic processing.

The MIT license comes from code releases performed by various agencies. For such releases, only the institute releasing the code was the owner of the rights. Other institutions adopted these licenses, replacing MIT with their names, which led to the existence of general licenses. Other licenses such as the BSD License from the University of California, originally consisting of four points, and now used in the three-point and two-point options, as well as the MIT-licensed version of the Internet Systems Consortium, were subject to such a process.

In each case, the organization identified itself as the owner of the rights, and took advantage of the opportunities of “work done for hire”, which allowed them to retain the rights to work done by employees and contractors. These rules usually do not apply to work that employees and contractors perform on their own initiative. Also, they do not apply to distributed groups of people working together who voluntarily provide their code. For funds managing projects like the Apache Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation that are receiving code from various sources, this is a problem. Funds usually coped with this using a home license that claimed one owner of the rights — Apache CLA and Eclipse CLA — to obtain rights from sponsors. Collecting rights in one place is even more important for all “copyleft” type licenses, for example, the GPL, which shift the responsibility of spreading free software values ​​to copyright owners.

Today, many projects that do not even manage the work of several code providers 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 with rights. As a result, most authors simply enter their name in the copyright holder's notice, and sometimes even insert a year.

The original owner of the code retains the rights to their work. But although MIT-like licenses give others the right to add-in and change software, creating what is called "derivative work", they do not give the original author the ability to own what other people have created. Everyone who has contributed, retains the rights to his own part of the work, carried out on the basis of the existing code.

Most projects do not bother to gather with the participants consent with the license, not to mention the signing of documents on the distribution of rights. This is naive, but understandable. Despite the developers' assumption 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 USA. By default, copyright protection is provided, not license transfer permissions.

To fill the gap between legalized and documented transfers of rights and the absence of any papers, some projects accept the Developer's Certificate of Origin, a certificate of origin from the developer, a standard statement that developers refer to using the Signed-Off-By meta tags. DCO was designed to develop a Linux kernel that came out of the Unix kernel owned by SCO. DCO copes well with the documentation of the process in which each of the Linux lines appeared thanks to contributing people. And although this is not a license, it provides plenty of good evidence that those who sent their code to the project meant that it would be distributed along with the project, and that users would use it according to the existing license for kernel. The kernel also supports the CREDITS human-readable file, which lists all the people who contributed, with names, membership, contribution area and other data.

Resolution


This license permits those who receive a copy of this software and related documentation (hereinafter referred to as "Software"),

The essence of the MIT license is that, as you might have guessed, a license. In general, a license is a permit that one person or a legal entity - the licensor - permits another - the licensee - to do something that could otherwise be challenged in court. An MIT license is a promise not to sue.

Sometimes the law divides the license and the promise to transfer the license. If someone breaks a promise to give you a license, you can sue him for breaking a promise, but you may still not get a license. In this sentence [ in the English version for this is the archaism "hereby" - approx. trans. ] it is explained that the text of this license in itself already gives you a license, and not just a promise to transfer it.

And although many licenses give permission for a specific named license, a license from MIT 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 uses this idea by offering a license to all "individuals who receive a copy of this software."

The term notation in parentheses and quotation marks (“Definition”) is the standard way of giving terms to a certain meaning in legal documents. The parties will be able to use these terms in legal proceedings.

Scope


gratis use of the Software without restrictions,

These words, from the point of view of the licensee, are the most important of all words of the MIT license. The main rights issues are the possibility of being prosecuted for copyright infringement and patent infringement. None of these areas of law uses the word "use for free". As a result, the court will ask what is meant by this definition. The court will see that this description is intentionally too broad and unclosed. It allows the licensee to resist any claims by the licensor that he did not give permission for any specific 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 the persons to whom this Software is provided,

There are no perfect legal texts, completely unambiguous or completely understandable. Do not believe if someone tells you otherwise. This part of the license is the least perfect.

First, “including unlimited right” is an example of how not to write legal texts. There are variations of this formulation:


Other.

All of them are written for one purpose, and none of them reaches it. Lawyers using them want to eat fish and not stranded. In the MIT license, they mean an attempt to present certain examples of “use of software” - “use, copy, modify,”, and so on. - without meaning that using this software will be possible only in one of the ways listed. The problem is that if you submit such a license in court, then the court will have to determine the meanings of these terms to understand the license. If the court wants to understand what it means to use the software, it will not be able to “see” the use cases specified in the license. I would say that it is best to write in the license "use software without restrictions." It is also shorter.

Secondly, the listed terms are a jumble. Some of these are described in copyright and patent laws, and some are not.


And finally, because of this mixture of legal, industrial, intellectual property and common terms, it is unclear whether the MIT license includes patent authorization. "Use" hints at patents, although 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 examples for the use of verbs and the definition of the software itself, indicate a copyright license. Newer licenses, like Apache 2.0, separately and explicitly mention copyright, patents, and even trademarks.

Three license terms


subject to the following conditions

There is always a catch - and MIT even has three!

If you do not comply with the conditions, you will not get permission. Therefore, in theory, in this case, you can sue, most likely under the copyright law.

Use the value of software as the licensee's motivation to fulfill the conditions, although he did not pay for the license, this is the second great idea of ​​open source software. The latter, which has no place in the MIT license, is based on license conditions — licenses such as the GNU Public License use conditions to control how people who make changes can license and distribute modified versions.

License transfer


The above copyright notice and these terms and conditions must be included in all copies or significant parts of this Software.

If you give someone a copy of the software, you must include the license text in it, and you can add any copyright notices. This has several goals:

  1. Tells the others that they have permissions for software under a public license. This is a key feature of models with the issuance of licenses directly, when 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 watered with compliments, fame and donations.

  3. Provides disclaimers and disclaimers.

Nobody forbids you to take money for distributing copies, or even make copies in compiled form, without the source code. But in this case, you can not pretend that the code belongs to you, or passes under some other license. Recipients of the product must know their rights under a “public license”.

These conditions, unfortunately, are performed poorly. Almost every open source license has such conditions. The creators of system and installed software often understand that they need to display a file with licensing information on the screen, include copies of the license in libraries and components. Project management funds train these practices. But web developers apparently did not receive notifications. There is no forgiveness.

Disclaimer of Warranties


THIS SOFTWARE, SOFTWARE, CURRENT OTHER CONDITIONS

In almost all US states, the law requires you to follow the version of the Uniform Commercial Code, a set of laws governing commercial transactions. Article 2 of the UCC is devoted to contracts for the sale of goods, from used cars bought at auction to deliveries of industrial chemicals.

Some UCC rules are binding and always apply. Others only describe the “default” state — unless sellers and buyers write something else in the agreement. Among such rules, by default, there are guarantees, that is, promises of sellers to buyers about the quality and suitability for the use of products.

There are disputes about whether public licenses like MIT are contracts — agreements to which licensees and licensors can be enforced — or just licenses to which conditions can be attached. A little less controversy is about whether the software is a commodity, and whether, therefore, it is in the UCC jurisdiction. But there is no dispute about the liability of the licensors: no one wants to be convicted, if the software they are distributing breaks down, causes problems, does not work, or somehow negatively manifests itself. This is the exact opposite of what the three default guarantee rules describe:

  1. Commercial availability, according to section 2-314, is a promise that a product — software — will not be below average quality, packaged and labeled appropriately, and is suitable for normal use. This rule applies only to software vendors - that is, to those who sell them and to those who consider themselves to be an expert in this field.

  2. Suitability to a specific goal, according to section 2-315, is used when the seller knows that the buyer expects the product to be suitable for use in a certain way.

  3. The absence of patent obstacles is not part of the UCC, but is commonly used in contract laws. It protects the buyer in the case when it turns out that the purchased product violates someone's intellectual rights.

Section 2-316 (3) requires that the text of the license, which excludes these guarantees, does this in a noticeable way - that is, by drawing attention to itself, rather than hiding in the form of small print on the last page of the contract. The same state laws may also be required from the announcement of the absence of patent obstacles.

Lawyers have long been mistaken that by writing the text in CAPITAL LETTERS, they fulfill the requirement of visibility. This is not true. Capital letters often repel the reader instead of attracting his attention. But most open source licenses write this part in caps, as this is the most obvious way to make text in plain text files stand out. I would prefer to use asterisks or another ASCII-art, but this train has already left.

Disclaimer


IN ORDER OF ANYTHING

The MIT license distributes software for free, but the law does not imply that people who receive a free license lose their right to a court 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.

Usually, the courts carefully read disclaimers of warranties, as this may help pass the risk from one side to the other. In order to give people the opportunity to defend themselves, in all possible cases the courts interpret these refusals against the one they protect. Often the courts refuse to take them into account if such conditions are located somewhere in the depth of the contract and are not distinguished. Therefore, lawyers are accustomed to writing in their capital letters.

Limitation of liability, among other things, limits the amount of money that can be condemned by the licensee. For open licenses, this limitation is always zero. Commercial licenses often contain multiples of license fees paid for the last 12 months.

This section lists those types of legal prosecution that the licensor cannot use. Like many legal forms, this license mentions breaches of contracts and delicts . The Rules of Torts relate to the commission of acts entailing damages. If you crushed someone on the road by sending an SMS, you committed a tort. If your company sold defective headphones that burned people's ears, it committed a tort. If the contract does not explicitly specify the exclusion of tort requirements, the courts sometimes use this. The MIT license states “for other requirements” in order to exclude any exotic requirements.

The phrase " ARRANGED FROM THE USE OF SOFTWARE OR OTHER ACTIONS WITH THE SOFTWARE"- a nervous tic, characteristic of the acquired fear for their security from a lawyer. The point is that any lawsuit related to this software is covered by limitations and exceptions. However, the use of the software is completely included in" other actions "with the software. [ In the original license There are three variants of events “arising from”, “in connection with”, “use” - that is, “arising from”, “in connection with” and “during use”, which, in fact, duplicate each other, which causes Claims from the author of the article - comment perev. ] However, this language is used in millions of other licenses.

Conclusion


But all these claims are not too large. The MIT license is a classic of jurisprudence. She works. It is not a panacea for all software diseases, in particular, patent disputes. But such licenses have served well, and serve a specific purpose — to repeal inconvenient rules adopted by default in copyright, sales, and contracts — with a minimum set of legal tools. In the context of computer subjects, its vitality is amazing. She survived and still survive most of the software that was licensed for it. One can only guess how many decades it will work. This is especially nice for those who cannot afford to hire lawyers.

We saw that the MIT license is a set of defined and standardized definitions that introduces chaos in the random versions of licenses accepted in different organizations.

We saw how her approach to defining authorship and copyright issues influenced the practice of property rights management in academic and commercial organizations.

We saw how it gives the rights to the software to everyone, free of charge, on conditions that protect the licensors from the performance of guarantees and liability.

We saw that, despite the somewhat clumsy verbosity and legal mannerism, this 171 words do a great deal of legal work and clear the way for open source software through dense shrubs of intellectual property and contracts.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/310976/

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