I often see Rust mentioned at the same time as MIT-type licenses.
Is it just a cultural thing that people who write Rust dislike Libre copyleft licenses? Or is it baked in to the language somehow?
Edit: It has been pointed out that I meant to say “copyleft”, not “libre”, so edited the title and body likewise.
Nope. It allows someone to use code without sharing the changes of that code. It enables non-free software creators like Microsoft to take the code, use it however they like, and not have to share back. This is what Free Software prevents.
Tired of people calling things like MIT and *BSD true libre/Free Software. They’re basically one step away from no license at all.
Nope, it is.
This is correct; it is a permissive license.
No, that is what copyleft (aims to) prevent.
The no True Scotsman fallacy requires a lack of authority about what what constitutes “true” - but in the case of Free/Libre software, we have one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
If you look at this license list (maintained by the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Lab) you’ll see that they classify many non-copyleft licenses as “permissive free software licenses”.
Under the Berne Convention of 1886, everything is copyrighted by default, so “no license at all” means that nobody has permission to redistribute it :)
The differences between permissive free software licenses and CC0 or a simple declaration that something is “dedicated to the public domain” are subtle and it’s easy to see them as irrelevant, but the choice of license does have consequences.
The FSF recommends that people who want to use a permissive license choose Apache 2.0 “for substantial programs” because of its clause which “prevents patent treachery”, while noting that that clause makes it incompatible with GPLv2. For “simple programs” when the author wants a permissive license, FSF recommends the Expat license (aka the MIT license).
It is noteworthy that the latter is compatible with GPLv2; MIT-licensed programs can be included in a GPLv2-only work (like the Linux kernel) while Apache 2.0-licensed programs cannot. (GPLv3 is more accommodating and allows patent-related additional restrictions to be applied, so it is compatible with Apache 2.0.)