Releasing my tools under the MIT License was probably a mistake (2023)

For basically as long as I can remember, I have been a staunch defender of permissive licenses over the more copyleft variety. I want you to use things I’ve written. On top of that I don’t believe it’s my place to force you to then open source things you have written that expand upon my source code. Hence my extensive use of the MIT License.

The MIT License is very simple. It basically says you can do whatever you want with the code, but you have to include the license and copyright when redistributing the code itself. It does not however require you to open source any modifications you make to the code, nor provide attribution to the non-code products of the work.

With my libraries, this has served me very well. It’s great, people use and contribute fixes back, and often donate back to me. I love it. I want you to use my code in your proprietary software. I open sourced it so you could do that. I specifically build open source libraries because I solved a problem I thought other people might face and wanted to save them time. Lifting the sea for all boats and all that. I have zero problem continuing to use the MIT License on my libraries.

I also open sourced the tools I host on my website, including but not limited to Pixel Circle / Oval Generator and Batch RewriteRule Generator. The MIT License seemed like the natural choice because I’ve been using it for everything I’ve released since the early 2000’s.

I’d considered these as just part of my website far more so than something I thought people would reuse. My intentions open sourcing these tools, unlike my libraries, was to promote the community helping me to improve them – and they certainly have done so. I have gotten so much great feedback and contributions to these tools, and I am very happy with that. Massive shout out to Tyson453 for his insanely awesome work improving the speed of the Pixel Circle / Oval Generator.

Against my well meaning intentions however, websites re-hosting my tools have been popping up like weeds. In some cases, they are even beating me in search results for my own tools. With noted exception, they don’t credit me as the author or provide any sort of link back. Many of them have made minor or major modifications to the tools, and next to none provide the source to those modifications. A number of them even have the gall to post links advertising them in the comments of my own tools.

Most irksome of all, in a fair number of cases they sit centrally on pages covered in ads and SEO keywords. My tools are being associated with a genuinely bad user experience.

This is all perfectly legal and allowed under the MIT License. That’s on me. It just is not in the spirit of what I intended. I didn’t have the foresight to see this coming. I didn’t think people so lacked in the spirit of open source. I wanted to promote community contributions, not to have them monetized by other people who don’t even provide the source to their modifications. I wanted to grow the tools as a community, not have closed source forks of them overtake my own open source versions.

There’s not a lot I can do. I could try to contact the owners of these sites and ask them to provide attribution, but there’s no obligation for them to do so. I could try to contact the owners of these sites and ask them to provide the source to their modifications, but again there is no obligation for them to do so. I really wish to see the changes shared alike, and the vain part of me would like attribution as the original author. At the end of the day though I chose the MIT License and it is what it is. It simply does not require any of that.

On top of everything else, until very recently and for completely unclear reasons, my website Donat Studios was completely blocked from Bing search results. This in turn meant I didn’t show up in DuckDuckGo or Yahoo results either. This meant that for a time the only results when searching these sites for my tools were these re-hosted versions.

I actually managed to reach a human at Bing and get this resolved, but it took a lot of work and I’m still not sure why it happened in the first place.

I am considering relicensing my tools under some sort of Attribution-ShareAlike license similar to the BY-SA the content on this site is licensed under. It would not apply to current and past versions of the tools as that code is licensed MIT and you can’t un-ring that bell. It would however apply to future versions. This would still promote community contributions, but would also require that any modifications be shared alike meaning that the modified source would have to be provided and I would have to be credited as the original author.

At the very least I will definitely think twice about the license I choose for future tools. I don’t want to be a jerk about it, but I also don’t want to see them monetized by others without even a link back to my website.

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