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[RRFC] move to MIT as default license for npm init, away from ISC #597

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bnb opened this issue Jun 8, 2022 · 6 comments
Open

[RRFC] move to MIT as default license for npm init, away from ISC #597

bnb opened this issue Jun 8, 2022 · 6 comments

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@bnb
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bnb commented Jun 8, 2022

Motivation ("The Why")

MIT is - in my experience - the general intentional default in the JavaScript ecosystem. Additionally, Wikipedia notes that the ISC itself has recommended that the MIT license should be preferred over the ISC license, though the reference is currently broken.

How

Replace ISC with MIT in almost all instances here.

@ljharb
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ljharb commented Jun 9, 2022

Another alternative is to default to something restrictive like unlicensed, so that licensing is an explicit choice by the author.

@bnb
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bnb commented Jun 10, 2022

If we were to not default to MIT and wanted to do something along those lines I'd prefer to just have it be an empty string. That is often (in my experience) closer to the actual intent in a situation where the default is published without being changed.

@ljharb
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ljharb commented Jun 10, 2022

I think it has to be valid SPDX, though.

@nlf
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nlf commented Nov 30, 2022

what if npm init -y omitted the license field entirely, and npm init prompted the user to actually provide a license. if they just press enter with no value, we warn and prompt again, if they press enter with no value a second time then we omit the field entirely.

that, combined with a warning when you publish if the license field has been omitted could take us pretty far i think

@ljharb
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ljharb commented Nov 30, 2022

That sounds great!

@bnb
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bnb commented Nov 30, 2022

huge +1 @nlf, assuming this also drops in a LICENSE file. this would also allow me to drop the license module from my init script.

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