jashkenas
commented
7 years ago A ha. This was an intentional change:
I'm of the opinion that BSD (and Lil, and MIT) already include the superset of what "sublicense" is intended to do in MIT. In short — a sublicense of an OSS project can only restrict the rights of what you can already do under the original license, and since you're required to include the original license, it's redundant to boot.
For a further exploration, see: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT-License-Line-by-Line.html
In particular the bit about sub-licensing:
sublicense is a general term of intellectual property law. The right to sublicense means the right to give others licenses of their own, to do some or all of what you have permission to do. The MIT License’s right to sublicense is actually somewhat unusual in open-source licenses generally. The norm is what Heather Meeker calls a “direct licensing” approach, where everyone who gets a copy of the software and its license terms gets a license direct from the owner. Anyone who might get a sublicense under the MIT License will probably end up with a copy of the license telling them they have a direct license, too.
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so seems redundant of “sublicense”. It’s also unnecessary to the extent folks who get copies also get a direct license.
Does that address your concern?
One of reasons I use the MIT license over BSD is the explicit right to sublicense the software,
Is it possible to make that right explicit in the Lil license?