There are a number of coding issues to overcome before we can regularly release MIT versions. The short story is there are bits of code distributed in Elgg that are licensed GPL only. We need to replace these before we can make regular MIT releases. 1.7.4 was a special release that had this code removed, but that system isn't maintainable for the long term.

Brett, maybe we could post list of such parts of the code somewhere? Then we can remove them gradually throught patches.

We have the two biggest ones on trac already:

http://trac.elgg.org/ticket/1479

http://trac.elgg.org/ticket/3468