Mitchell: The MIT License, Line by Line

At his blog, Kyle E. Mitchell ("who is not your attorney") takes a close, line-by-line reading of the popular MIT software license. The details he points out begin on line one with the license's title: "'The MIT License' is a not a single license, but a family of license forms derived from language prepared for releases from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It has seen a lot of changes over the years, both for the original projects that used it, and also as a model for other projects. The Fedora Project maintains a kind of cabinet of MIT license curiosities, with insipid variations preserved in plain text like anatomical specimens in formaldehyde, tracing a wayward kind of evolution."

Despite the license being only 171 words, Mitchell finds quite a bit to expand on, such as the ambiguities of the phrase "to deal in the Software without restriction": "As a result of this mishmash of legal, industry, general-intellectual-property, and general-use terms, it isn't clear whether The MIT License includes a patent license. The general language 'deal in' and some of the example verbs, especially 'use', point toward a patent license, albeit a very unclear one. The fact that the license comes from the copyright holder, who may or may not have patent rights in inventions in the software, as well as most of the example verbs and the definition of 'the Software' itself, all point strongly toward a copyright license." Nevertheless, Mitchell notes, "despite some crusty verbiage and lawyerly affectation, one hundred and seventy one little words can get a hell of a lot of legal work done."