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MIT has no special language regarding source or binary distribution, it simply states:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

It's up to a court to decide what "copies or substantial portions of the Software" means.

Personally, I've always very much interpreted that to mean both binary and source.



Well, you could argue that the notice is "present" (in a very esoteric sense) in a binary distribution of the software because it was present in the source code used to build it. You could also argue that a compiled version of a program isn't a "copy or substantial portion" of the Software (compilation is effectively a form of translation, which is a derivative work under the Copyright Act in the US -- and not just a copy).

Personally I would still include it in both, but I always had the impression that MIT was looser than BSD-2-Clause about this. BSD-2-Clause explicitly states that binary distribution needs to include the notice in "the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution", and I have a feeling that the license authors might've had a reason to want to be explicit about it.




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