Ask HN: Why will someone contribute to a project which is licensed under MIT?

Basically it boils down to whether you think whatever you personally gain from contributing outweighs the likelihood (or certainty) of not making money from it.

It's also worth noting that there's nothing inherently evil or distasteful about proprietary software. It's proprietary exactly because it's meant to produce a monetary return on the time and effort invested in it.

Whether you aim for monetary gain, and with what degree of certainty, is just a personal choice you make.

There is probably many different reasons.

Mine is that it's better that this work benefit to a proprietary software than to nobody.

Then, there is a hope that bugs will be found, and even that corrections will be sent back to the MIT licensed software.

It all depends on which false dichotomy you're looking at. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to see the choice as being between the code being tied up in a proprietary project and being readily available in a popular Free Software project. Given those choices, I'll readily chose the later option and avoid the MIT license.

A different false dichotomy, though is whether you'd prefer to see your code buried in a proprietary project or to have every copy and back of your code burned before your very eyes. Is it worse for some mooch to make money off your hard work or for all your hard work to be wasted and no one benefits.

The vast majority of the code I've written will never earn me a single penny. I've come to terms with that. There's a couple of pieces that my vanity has convinced me have potential and they're licensed under the GPL. The rest, though, is fully MIT licensed. If they wind up in a proprietary software project, that's wonderful, because it means that someone is actually using it. That's pretty much my best case scenario and far superior to the likely outcome where the project fades into obscurity and the code benefits no one.

Even if someone uses your code in proprietary software, someone else may still use it in something open, or contribute their own changes back to your project. And it is advantageous for anyone improving the code to contribute it to the project, because that makes the project better, and makes it more likely that others will use it and improve it, and you will ultimately benefit from their contributions too.

I tend to avoid viral GPL/LGPL projects:

1) Because I wanna have the freedom to eventually sell the software based on third party libraries.

2) Even if I would want to open source parts of the project, I mostly can't open source all of it, because of proprietary code from third parties (e.g. bought assets from Unity Asset Store).

3) I have no interest in a license telling me how I have to license my own source code.

It all comes down to why you want to write software. If you want to be paid for writing software, then doing it on your own time and contributing to an MIT licensed project is NOT the way to go.

On the other hand, if your goal is to have your software used by as many people as possible, then MIT licensed may be the way to go. In my case, the piece of software that I wrote that runs in the most places (measured in the billions) is probably the IJG JPEG library that was very liberally licensed and consequently found its way into all sorts of devices... Yes, I wrote the code back in 1991 but it still gives me a kick to know how often it is used!

Group A wants to use the code for profit. Group B wants to work with A but will contribute some code back. Group C isn't too bothered about licence but wants to work with B or on their resulting code. Group D prefers GPL, but uses MIT because B and C are. It can flow the other way too, think how insignificant GPL might be without GNU and linux.

If you write code in the open, most often than not you do not really care what other people will do with it. If the project is MIT, that's fine. If the project is GPL, that's fine too. Often the license is somebody else's concern, not the actual creator.

I remember Woz saying he planned to give away his designs and it was Jobs who convinced him not to. Woz was fine too, he didn't care. Only Jobs cared.

Even if it is GPL I'm sure that many people will not honor it, just like there are tons of deadbeats who do not pay for closed source software even if it is just for the rush involved in outsmarting the closed source developer. It is human nature and I'm sure that programmers working in GPL projects know it and do not care.