CC0 licence? about hardhat-starter-kit HOT 4 CLOSED

The MIT license is often chosen purposefully so that derivative works remain open source. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html

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Thanks for bringing this up! @StephenFluin wondering if you have any insight here?

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The MIT license is often chosen purposefully so that derivative works remain open source. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html

If that's the intention then wouldn't the GPL better serve that goal?

I'm not sure that MIT is intended to be copy-left in this way. My understanding is that MIT is permissive, promoting wide adoption, and the terms are there merely to disclaim liability and preserve some credit for the author, deliberately avoiding any additional restrictions on derivative works, since that would inhibit derivative works.

Of course, if you consider this copy-left aspect of the MIT licence to be a feature and not a bug, then I respect that. Personally though, it means I'd rather put together a hardhat project manually than use this template.

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We're choosing the MIT license intentionally because it strikes the right balance of permissiveness and copy-left, which we think enables most developers and companies to adopt it.

This decision is in line with most of the software in our space (eg https://github.com/ethereum/solc-js/blob/master/LICENSE, https://github.com/smartcontractkit/chainlink/blob/develop/LICENSE).

Thanks for sharing the feedback and we'll continue looking at this over time to see if this is helping or hurting developers.

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