I wouldn't be all that surprised to hear the real reason Rails chose MIT license was because that's what everyone else was doing.
I remember there was a surge of projects on Github, almost all of them MIT license.
I remember there was a surge of projects on Github, almost all of them MIT license.
Edit: Here's the initial commit in 2004, with MIT License already in there, way before Github launched in 2008 — https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/db045dbbf60b53dbe013ef...