[License-review] License Review Submission: Irrevocable MIT License (MIT-I)

[Kevin P. Fleming]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2025, at 14:52, Jean-Sebastien Carle wrote:
> Thank you everyone for taking the time to review my proposal. What I'm essentially trying to create is a MIT style license where the same license cannot suddenly change its license to go from being free open source software to paid open/closed source software. Trust in building software using open source software is being decimated by a large quantity of highly used, high profile, dependencies which developers build into their own software on the premise that that dependency is in fact free open source software. Then, after these dependencies have become tightly coupled and embedded in upstream software products, those dependencies have switched to restrictive, paid, licenses which essentially hold the consumers of those dependencies hostage.

You're trying to solve a problem in the wrong place. The copyright holder can always choose a different license, or multiple licenses, when they distribute copies of the software. This has no effect on previously-distributed copies of the software, those continue to be licensed the way they were when they were distributed. If that license allows for others to distribute those copies (as any OSI-approved license would), then anyone is free to distribute those copies under the previous license.

If you want to place obligations on the copyright holder(s) then the place to do that is in some sort of contribution agreement which the contributors sign and which places obligations on the use of their contributions. Some projects do this already, they have contribution agreements which nullify their permission to distribute contributions if they try to distribute them under an license which does not grant the permissions that were agreed to.

Attempting to solve this problem in the outbound license doesn't really make any sense, as no copyright holder would ever choose this license if they had any desire or future desire to change their distribution practices. It also doesn't make any sense for projects where the software has a single copyright holder, or a dominant copyright holder, as in those cases there wouldn't be anyone in a position to attempt to enforce the obligations in the license.

Nobody is 'held hostage' by a license change, because the software they have already placed into usage still has its original license. If you want a license which obligates the copyright holder(s) to distribute all of their future changes under the same license, then that already exists - all copyleft licenses work that way.
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