{"id":"MIT","title":"The MIT License","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spdx/license-list-data/main/text/MIT.txt","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"corrected","summary":"The record models the MIT license: all six core permissions, commercial use, and the copyright-and-permission notice as cc:Attribution and cc:Notice duties on distribute, modify and derive. Two rights the text names explicitly, sublicensing and selling copies, were missing and were added, and the SPDX id was added. One duty, the modification notice, has no basis in the text.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"minor","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"The record id is the SPDX list id but the field was absent. Added.","action":"applied","change":"spdx:licenseId \"MIT\" ;\n"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The grant reads: \"to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software\". Sublicensing (odrl:grantUse) and charging for a copy (dalicc:chargeDistributionFee) were not modelled. Added both.","action":"applied","change":"odrl:permission [ a odrl:Permission ;\n        odrl:action odrl:grantUse ],\n    [ a odrl:Permission ;\n        odrl:action dalicc:chargeDistributionFee ] ;\n"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"odrl:modify and odrl:derive carry a dalicc:modificationNotice duty. The MIT license has exactly one condition, \"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software\", and says nothing about documenting changes. The duty makes MIT look more demanding than it is in every compatibility result. Removing it is a substantive change to a heavily used record, so it is left open for the association's decision.","action":"superseded","superseded_by":2,"change":"# remove from the odrl:modify and odrl:derive permissions\nodrl:duty [ a odrl:Duty ;\n        odrl:action dalicc:modificationNotice ] ;\n"},{"rubric":1,"severity":"minor","field":"dct:publisher","description":"No dct:publisher. The MIT license has no steward, so \"- not specified -\" would at least make the gap explicit.","action":"none"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"info","field":"vocabulary","description":"The MIT license grants no patent rights. There is nothing to record, but once a dalicc:patentGrant term exists its absence here is a real difference from Apache-2.0 that users compare these two licenses for.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"major","field":"record","description":"Standard-license addition of 2026-09-15, decision 9: the record was corrected against its new siblings and versioned. The review's finding on family consistency: the record carried neither the relicensing prohibition its siblings carry nor a separate liability clause. The MIT text says 'The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software', which is the same clause IscLicense and BSD-3-Clause model as a dalicc:ChangeLicense prohibition, and its disclaimer paragraph holds two sentences, the second beginning 'IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE'.","action":"applied"}],"family":"MIT, ISC, Zlib, Boost, UPL, WTFPL (permissive, short)","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"notes":"The most requested record in the library. The modification-notice duty is the only remaining overstatement."}