Yes, the MIT License allows commercial use. Its text grants permission to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies of the software, with no distinction drawn between commercial and non-commercial users. You can sell MIT-licensed code, bundle it into a paid product, ship it inside closed-source software, or run it on servers behind a subscription service, all without paying royalties and without releasing your own code. The only real obligation is keeping the original copyright and license notice attached to the software when you distribute it.
What Commercial Use Covers
The license draws no line between commercial and non-commercial activity. Every right it grants applies equally to both. In practice, that covers selling the software directly, embedding it as a component in a paid product, offering it as part of a subscription service, and using it to build internal tools that give your business a competitive edge.
There is no royalty. There is no revenue threshold that triggers a payment. There is no separate commercial license to negotiate with the original author. The permission grant in the license text is the permission, and it is unconditional except for the notice requirement discussed below.
The MIT License also carries no copyleft. You can take MIT-licensed code, modify it heavily, fold it into a proprietary codebase, and ship the final product as closed-source software. Nothing in your project needs to be published. This is the point where the MIT License diverges sharply from the GPL family: under the GPL, distributing a modified version obligates you to make your source code available, but the MIT License imposes no such duty. The original MIT-licensed portion keeps its notice; everything else about your work stays yours to release or not.
The One Condition: Keep the Notice
The single compliance obligation is retaining the copyright notice and the full license text whenever you distribute the software or a substantial portion of it. The entire grant of rights is conditioned on that inclusion. Strip the notice out and you are no longer operating under the license.
Most developers satisfy this by keeping a LICENSE or LICENSE.txt file at the root of the project’s source. For compiled applications, the notice typically appears in an “About” dialog, a third-party acknowledgments screen, or the bundled documentation. The format is flexible. The presence of the text is not.
Distribution, Internal Use, and SaaS
The notice requirement is triggered by distributing copies or substantial portions of the software. If you use MIT-licensed code purely internally and never ship it outside your organization, the attribution condition doesn’t bite in the same way, because you aren’t handing copies to anyone.
SaaS is the gray zone. When your application runs on a server and users interact through a browser, you arguably aren’t distributing copies of the software to those users at all. The license text doesn’t address the scenario. Most legal practitioners treat server-only deployment as falling outside the distribution trigger, meaning you would not technically need to surface the notice to end users. Including a third-party notices page anyway costs nothing and removes the ambiguity, which is why many SaaS companies publish one.
The Patent Gap
The MIT License contains no explicit patent grant. Its language (“deal in,” “use,” “sell”) uses recognized patent terms, and legal scholars have argued this likely creates an implied patent license, but no court has conclusively settled the question for the MIT License specifically.
The Apache License 2.0, by contrast, includes a dedicated “Grant of Patent License” section that gives users a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable patent license covering contributions to the work. It also terminates that license automatically if you sue anyone for patent infringement related to the software.
For small projects, the missing explicit grant in the MIT License is usually a non-issue. If you’re building a commercial product on top of a large MIT-licensed codebase with many contributors, the theoretical risk of a contributor asserting patent claims is worth raising with your legal team. Businesses with meaningful patent exposure sometimes pick Apache 2.0 for this reason.
You Carry the Risk
The software comes “as is,” with no warranty of any kind. There is no guarantee it works, suits your purpose, or avoids infringing someone else’s intellectual property. If a bug in the code takes down your product, you have no warranty claim against the author.
The license also disclaims liability for damages arising from the software, whether the claim would sound in contract, tort, or anything else. The disclaimers protect the original developer, not you. Test MIT-licensed code thoroughly before it reaches production, because nobody is standing behind it if something breaks.
What a Violation Actually Costs
Because the license has only one real condition, violations are hard to commit by accident. They happen mostly when a company strips the notice before shipping.
The stakes turn on how a court treats that notice requirement. If it’s a condition of the license rather than a mere covenant, using the software without the notice means you never had permission in the first place. That opens the door to a copyright infringement claim rather than a breach of contract claim, and the two are not close in severity.
Copyright infringement remedies under federal law let a rights holder seek actual damages plus the infringer’s attributable profits, or elect statutory damages instead. Statutory damages run from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, and a court can raise that to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. Courts can also grant injunctions, impound infringing copies, and award attorney’s fees. Contract damages are ordinarily capped at the harmed party’s actual loss, and the author of free software may have a hard time showing much. The copyright path gives them far more leverage.
Litigation over MIT License violations is rare, and the practical lesson is simple. Ship the notice. It is a trivially easy requirement, and skipping it trades a two-line inclusion for exposure that a commercial product cannot afford.