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
That doesn’t explain the preference for MIT tho
Preference for MIT and Apache is part of the culture of rust. Also, the lead dev behind Redox has mentioned that he chose MIT over GPL because it makes it easier to contribute, which he felt was important for getting Redox off the ground.
Mit is kind of the “I don’t care and I don’t want to think about it” license. I also suspect many will also just use the same license they see in other projects. So, if they’ve been using rust crates that are MIT, they’re more likely to pick that. But who knows.
That makes sense, it’s probably easier to just use MIT instead of learning the differences between GPLv2, v3, AGPL, LGPL, MPL etc