Wasn't Rails the first major OSS to move to Github when Github first appeared? IIRC it's the other way around: everyone started using MIT because Rails did.

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...

Things were going quickly on the run-up to Rails moving over, but even so, Rails was pretty aggressive at jumping on GitHub when they did, and it was one of our first real "major" open source projects on the site, in hindsight. There was a huge difference pre-Rails and post-Rails.

Perhaps, yes. My main thought was there wasn't a lot of thought behind choosing the license back then.

Github itself was written with rails, yea? Seems almost like mutualistic dogfooding.