MIT, Sans-elon

The MIT license, but Elon Musk and all of his companies are explicitly denied usage.

Tue Nov 15 2022

2 min read

A few friends and I were talking about the hot-topic of the Elon Musk twitter takeover, specifically, we were talking about this tweet:

Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022

This tweet is ridiculous for so many reasons:

• It doesn’t really make any sense, seemingly just some technobabble slapped together to seem intelligent.
• Even if you give Elon the benefit of the doubt and say by “RPC” he meant REST / HTTP calls, Batching them won’t necessarily improve performance given HTTP2.
• The tweet seems to imply this is a new issue, which, if anything, would also imply that Elon and his antics are to blame.
• Someone was seemingly fired from Twitter’s Android app team for pointing out that the tweet was plain wrong. Firing an SME on your product, who has likely worked to improve the exact deficiency you’re complaining about is a bad look.
• The whole thing really just feels like something out of HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Having talked about all of this, a friend joked that someone should create an MIT license that explicitly denies Elon Musk or any of his companies’ usage of the associated software. So I did, it’s called MIT-SE and you can check it out here.

1. Is this a silly thing that I made more to make a few friends laugh than for any practical reason? yes!
2. Is it likely that I’ll use MIT-SE in some of my toy open-source projects, also yes! see point 1 for why.