I wouldn't be all that surprised to hear the real reason Rails chose MIT license was because that's what everyone else was doing.

I remember there was a surge of projects on Github, almost all of them MIT license.

Wasn't Rails the first major OSS to move to Github when Github first appeared? IIRC it's the other way around: everyone started using MIT because Rails did.

Edit: Here's the initial commit in 2004, with MIT License already in there, way before Github launched in 2008 — https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/db045dbbf60b53dbe013ef...

Things were going quickly on the run-up to Rails moving over, but even so, Rails was pretty aggressive at jumping on GitHub when they did, and it was one of our first real "major" open source projects on the site, in hindsight. There was a huge difference pre-Rails and post-Rails.

Perhaps, yes. My main thought was there wasn't a lot of thought behind choosing the license back then.

Github itself was written with rails, yea? Seems almost like mutualistic dogfooding.

Some companies have strict "call the legal department before using GPL/AGPL software" policies.

But they were using Linux anyway (that's GPL 2, plus all the userland sw) especially with Rails which used to be a nightmare to run on Windows. Macs were OK.

AGPL could have been a problem though. I wonder if monkey patching a Rails class would be derivative work.