[artlogic]

> I thought the MIT License was always the best license to use.

This community in particular seems to like the MIT License because it is quite simple and perceived as commercial friendly. The truth is, like most things, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Open source licenses all have an agenda. If your agenda is "Anyone should be able to use this software, for any purpose, and not hold me liable," then the MIT License is perhaps the simplest option.

In my (non-lawyer) opinion, where the MIT License falls short is in assuming that all contributors, companies, and users share the basic ideal that licensing software for free use and modification is in our collective best interest. Other licenses (Apache, GPL) try to attack this problem in various ways. It turns out it's a complicated and not fully understood domain - which is why those licenses are more complex.

The point is that there is no "best" license to use because licensing is not a technical problem - it's a social problem. Licenses attempt to address the slippery concept of community using a legal framework. In choosing a license, you want to be thinking about not just the community you are currently contributing to, but the community you would ideally like to be contributing to.