// the find
remy/mit-license
Hosted MIT License with details controlled through this repo
A hosted service that gives you a permanent URL for your MIT license — instead of copying a LICENSE file into every project, you point to rem.mit-license.org (or your own subdomain). The repo itself is the database: user JSON files live in the users/ directory, themes are CSS files in themes/. It's been running since 2011 with community-funded domain and hosting.
The URL design is genuinely clever: it handles year ranges, pinned years, plain-text format, and MIT vs ISC selection all through path segments with no query string gymnastics. The self-service API (a single curl POST) means you can register a namespace in seconds without waiting for a PR merge. The theming system grew organically into 60+ community-contributed CSS files, which is remarkable for something this focused. Domain is funded through 2032, which is about as credible a longevity signal as you get for a personal side project.
This is a centralized single point of failure for something developers are putting in their LICENSE files and READMEs — if mit-license.org goes down or Remy stops paying Heroku, every link rots. The users/ directory has grown into thousands of JSON files with no namespacing, making the git history a noise machine and every PR a trivial one-liner. Updating your user file after the initial curl POST requires submitting a pull request, which is a disproportionately heavy workflow for changing an email address. There's no ownership verification — anyone can claim any unclaimed handle and put someone else's name in the copyright field.