MIT License facts for kids

The MIT License is a free software license that was created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It is a permissive license, meaning that it allows programmers to put the code in proprietary software on the condition that the license is given with that software, and GPL-compatible, meaning that the GPL permits programmers to combine and redistribute it with software that uses the MIT License.

According to the Free Software Foundation, the MIT License is more accurately called the X11 license, since MIT has used many licenses for software and the license was first written for the X Window System.

Software that use the MIT License include Expat, PuTTY, Mono development platform class libraries, Ruby on Rails, Cakephp, Twisted, Lua 5.0 onwards and the X Window System, which the license was written for.

Some software are dual licensed under the MIT License, such as older versions of the cURL library, which allowed recipients to choose either the Mozilla Public License or the MIT License.

License

This is the license:

Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

Related pages

• List of software licenses

See also

In Spanish: Licencia MIT para niños