I fear that a lot of new Linux tools are losing the “Linux way “
Posted by 3X0karibu@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 296 comments
More and more software seems to be abandoning the “older” ways of Linux and maybe even unix, more and more modern tools seem to entirely forgo man pages and more and more software seems to be using non copyleft licenses (MIT specifically), I fear that this is a misstep, man pages are a staple for a reason and are usually easier to use than the average -h of a program, MIT and similar licenses allow malicious actors to just steal the source code and sell it without repercussions or to just not give back to the people that worked on it originally
floralfrog@reddit
I actually thought about the missing man pages for a few newer tools I installed recently and wondered why the authors didn’t bother. At the end of the day though if the developer isn’t interested in providing a comprehensive -h flag, a poorly written man page wouldn’t help either.
infektor23@reddit
Yeah, I don't get it. It's super easy with tools like ronn you can just write Markdown to create a man page with minimal effort.
repomies69@reddit
Isn't the Linux way to issue a pull request, not to except someone to do the work free for you
Jojos_BA@reddit
This. If u are unsatisfied and its open source, just do something.
Especially if its poor docs.
GolemancerVekk@reddit
Are you guys missing the incentive part? Nobody does things just because, not even in the FOSS world. What incentive would I have to write docs for a random project?
ngoonee@reddit
Eh, with an attitude like that open source wouldn't exist. There is value in contributing to humanity.
GolemancerVekk@reddit
Are you being serious right now? "Scratch an itch" is one of the most fundamental concepts of FOSS. Nobody gets involved with a FOSS project out of the goodness of their heart. There are many motivators for FOSS contribution (peer review, professional recognition, technical challenge, creative expression, getting paid) but altruism is not one of them. There have been countless scientific studies done on it, since FOSS is a very important global phenomenon.
Would you contribute with zero incentive to random projects you aren't interested in? What projects have you contributed to in that manner? Let's see you prove those silly scientists wrong.
ngoonee@reddit
How did "profit motive" become just "motive"? As for the lack of altruistic motive, I think you're just projecting ygour own selfishness.
The act of contribution is itself an altruistic effort for most hobbyists (and a lot of the "professionals" as well). If I find an open source project that I like which lacks something I need and I then solve that problem, myself, on my machine, all my own motivations are met. Putting in the effort to tidy things up, submit a PR, and fix things to the satisfaction of the project leader has no personal benefit to me, yet I do it because it's the right thing to do and because the benefit I get from that project is the result of others like myself doing the same. Most of humanity works that way despite what reductive economists would have you believe. Doing good for others is a powerful motivation.
jameson71@reddit
If Linux ever fails, you are the reason.
dkopgerpgdolfg@reddit
What a sad view of the world.
jood580@reddit
To make it better...
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Why, when it's got the wrong license to begin with. Not helping undermine the GPL.
01209@reddit
Try suggesting it? I think most people don't really understand the differences, tbh.
ZunoJ@reddit
You can't just change the license if other people contributed already
01209@reddit
That makes sense.
einpoklum@reddit
You have to be very proficient with a program in order to correctly document it. Yes, you could probably convert the
-hcontent into a man page, but that's really insufficient. A man page should have more context, more detailed explanations, link to other related programs, mention standards where applicable, etc.Which means, that most users - except the very well-read and well-informed few - can't really write the man page. It is, for the most part, a task for the developer.
small_kimono@reddit
Yes we can!
See: https://www.gnu.org/software/help2man/
einpoklum@reddit
Are there particular
-hformats / producer libraries help2man is good with, or does it do a decent job generally?FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
If you've got the -h down, you can have an AI write you a draft man page with a query or two.
DeLaVicci@reddit
Recommending AI on a post about people being too lazy to follow existing standards is definitely an interesting play.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Just being realistic. These people can't even be bothered to read a reference book from O'Reilly. They aren't going to write documentation, they don't see the point. They were never taught the point. But they sure do love their AI, might as well get them to do something worth a damn with it.
GolemancerVekk@reddit
Writing docs about how to use the tool would require you to become an expert on the tool, at which point you wouldn't need the docs... so the docs still don't get written.
The incentive for writing docs only exists for someone who wants the tool to get used, but if the tool's author doesn't care why would anybody else?
mattmahn@reddit
Maybe the tool author couldn't be bothered to setup tooling/etc. If someone opens an MR with mostly correct docs, maybe that's the nudge the tool author needs to write complete docs. "The quickest way to the answer is to be wrong on the internet" and all that.
TheIncarnated@reddit
Submits PR to PodMan and it's all the man pages about docker with names replaced... >.>
-F0v3r-@reddit
sure but wouldn’t it also be an endless cycle? one can’t PR new docs when he doesn’t how it works and he won’t know how it works without the docs. sure advanced users will know or get the idea from the source code or whatever but new people looking for docs won’t know.
oneword_dev@reddit
Commenting so I can find this easily for next time I need to create a man page haha
flukus@reddit
You can save a post.
HelloWorld40222@reddit
Same here lol
stobbsm@reddit
And many modern languages can generate man pages from comments as well, better than a bad man page.
0riginal-Syn@reddit
You can always help and contribute to building a man page.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Why would we do that if it is not GPL?
ilep@reddit
More people should notice and help with the manpages project. I think there was news not too long ago how it is basically one guy doing it.
Enter the xkcd comic about how world of software relies on one project keeping everything running.
NightOfTheLivingHam@reddit
"But there is a wiki!"
AdmiralQuokka@reddit
A lot of these new tools are written in Rust. clap is the main library for CLI tools in Rust. It makes nice help pages super simple. And, Rust people are used to easily distributing their statically compiled binaries. man pages, which don't live inside that binary, don't perfectly fit in that picture. Although I agree it's cleaner. clap actually does have the ability to generate man pages, I just don't see it used as often as it could be. At least, I think, adding man page support should be done when a project is popular enough for distros to package it. In regular distro packages, shipping with man pages makes much more sense than in the context of downloading binaries from github.
deadlygaming11@reddit
Yep. Here is the bits for my rust program:
Running \target/debug/main -dh`A Program For Filtering An XLSX Document From an EmailUsage: main [OPTIONS]`Options:-d, --debug Toggles Debug Mode Which Stops The Email Sending and Increases Verbosity-i, --install Installs The Base Components of The Program-n, --name <NAME> Changes the Filter Name For The XLSX Document-h, --help Print help (see more with '--help')-V, --version Print versionThe first section of each line comes out blue so its quite visible.
43 use clap::Parser;45 #[derive(Parser, Debug)]46 #[command(name = "Program", author = "deadlygaming11", version = "2.1.0", about = "A Program For Filtering An XLSX Document From an Email", long_about = "This Program Takes an XLSX Document, Filters the Contents, and Then Sends the Contents as a Table in an Email")]47 struct Args {48 #[arg(long, short, help = "Toggles Debug Mode Which Stops The Email Sending and Increases Verbosity")]49 debug: bool,5051 #[arg(long, short, help = "Installs The Base Components of The Program")]52 install: bool,5354 #[arg(long, short, help = "Changes the Filter Name For The XLSX Document")]55 name: Option<String>,56 }Thats the whole thing for my command line bits. Its easy and simple to use so I can understand not creating man pages as this is just as good.
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
I'm going to get downvoted to hell but there is a reason people don't like the GPL license in many cases. Its way too restrictive against so many use cases of the average person, and it hardly addresses corporate use and abuse of FOSS developers and source code.
like I did a tiny bit of work on Ghostty which is MIT licensed, and the goal was to match a Unicode behavior of Kitty terminal that users have come to expect as the standard, but Kitty is GPLv3, so I cannot reference Kitty code at all and in reality there is nothing I can even offer the Kitty project while working on this terminal emulator. There is nothing I can even "give back" to Kitty. To me this is anti-learning and harms interoperability. In contrast, who is this protecting? I'm already out here contributing to a multitude of projects regardless of their license, I do not need to be forced to do so.
a point for the GPL would be when you are creating a massive tool like a C/C++ compiler, or a core library. But they just skirt around it anyways by dynamically linking or pulling it through the network stack. If they can't do that, they just create or create another project like LLVM + Clang... and the GPL does zero to address developers like the person who wrote and maintains XZ compression, they still got exploited to all hell, while multiple nearly trillion dollar corporations use their code and demand support. Its not working.
I license my shit MIT or Unlicense because I WANT people to learn from my code, or copy a file in my code and slap it into their project. That's how people learn. I think this hard line stance is anti-intellectual and against the spirit of what I like about open source, and thats selflessness and collaboration and the GPL is poorly positioned to fight exploitation in OSS. There is a reason a lot of GPL projects are getting cooked, they have zero flexibility. There are successful cases of the GPL too, but if you can't address the reality now, then you will be permanently behind... and if the only way to achieve your goal is to ignore those problems and try harder to get people to use the GPL or similar, then you are fighting a battle that can't be won. You have to address those issues.
DFS_0019287@reddit
Can you enumerate a few of these "average person" use-cases?
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
creating a godot game, single file libs, learning (which is massive), matching behavior across tooling (like I outlined in my post), specific cross-references (say Im writing a shell and I want to see how Almquist Shell handles a specific variable expansion but I don't want to adopt their license), etc... thats just off the top of my head.
the game development is an interesting case because Godot is MIT, and Godot offers plugins and people share Autoloads, and 99% of them are Unlicense or MIT because you literally cant make your game GPL because you would like to use a simple utility, because it massively complicates the process of selling a game and it quickly becomes hard to reason out. Plugins can be GPL as long as they dont ship with the game, but few do it. But in a person to person context I dont care what a license is, I share my code, people share back. We help each other.
a corporate context VS institutional developer, it is different, but Im not convinced that the GPL protects as much as people say. Im open to having my mind changed though, this is purely based on my experience.
In
einpoklum@reddit
If you made those things GPL - your game, your tools etc. - then you could use GPL code in them.
Plus - when you write libraries, you (almost) never use GPL anyway, so that's not an issue anyway. IMO.
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
if you aren't going to make libs GPL licensed then I really don't see the point of the GPL because thats what corporations really use the most. I personally couldn't care less how someone uses my application, if I cared, I would just charge money outright and be closed source.
for a simple example look at the success of Pixelorama (MIT) over Aseprite (Closed Source and Paid) and look at Toybox, u-boot, rust core-utils, or BSD coreutils over GNU Coreutils... there isn't really any evidence that these projects are worse off, in fact some of these projects currently have a lot more commits and patches than GNU.
so its hard for me to see that benefit outside of the big examples in the past where the GPL had the upper hand.
einpoklum@reddit
The GNU project libraries are typically LGPL'ed, not GPLed.
Anyway, the question of what "corporations use the most" is mostly irrelevant. Free Software is not created to cater to corporations.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Many of us won't be adopting an MIT or BSD licensed core utils. Just because Ubuntu does it doesn't make it main stream.
zenware@reddit
It does “protect” the actual code itself from being used or improved by companies that are averse to infecting their products with GPL, but it doesn’t protect against a company extracting value from those projects by simply building a wide enough gap between them, or even cleanroom engineering a new version from spec.
A friend of mine was thinking about this earlier this year: https://shazow.net/posts/permissive-vs-copyleft/
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
and see, that is a major problem that is essentially just ignored... I'm not saying its an easy problem to solve, or that there is some easy solution, just that we have to be proactive and have an answer for it... and that if someones solution is to just heavily push other people to use the GPL or similar, then they are going to be eternally frustrated that people aren't living up to those expectations.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
No, you just blacklist projects and developers who make code other than GPL. Don't hire them. Don't work with them. Don't let them in your forums, your sub reddits, your conferences, etc. Ostracize them for it. Shame them for it. They chose their pro-corporate licenses, let them lay in it.
DFS_0019287@reddit
Again, these are developer use-cases, not "average person" use-cases.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Corporate developer use-cases, at that.
zenware@reddit
Very often I’m in the middle of writing a project and think “I wonder if there’s an example I could reference for this feature?” So I search it and I find 15 projects on GitHub that all use a GPL license and then I close GitHub, because I don’t want to worry about what kind of legal trouble I’m going to create now or on the future for having ever even looked at a piece of GPL code. I don’t read GPL source code, and have worked for employers who while not outright forbid it, let’s say “actively discourage” people from working with GPL code.
There are other issues too like, you cannot post GPL code on stack overflow, https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/287986/posting-gpl-code-in-an-answer This is a bit less relevant now that all the LLM tools people are using just show them GPL code on the chat window all day. — And I for example wouldn’t post a snippet of GPL code on this website, or any other place for that matter, because to do so it has to carry the whole license with it, and if you have read that snippet, your personal memory of it also needs to be infected with the license, so it’s really rather burdensome.
MIT code snippets by comparison I will freely read and learn from and feel safe sharing anywhere without believing that I’m causing undue burden on people or platform.
DFS_0019287@reddit
You're not going to get in trouble for reading and learning from GPL'd code. Unless you replicate a substantial amount of non-trivial code in a non-GPL'd project, you're totally fine.
The GPL is not a virus. It only applies to derived works, and something you write on your own after having looked at other code is certainly not a derived work (unless, as I said, you include a substantial amount of non-trivial code from the original project... but then you're just copying, not learning.)
small_kimono@reddit
I'd note this is not the position of GPL advocates (and Linus Torvalds FTM). See: https://lkml.org/lkml/2003/12/3/228
IMHO this POV is nuts.
BosonCollider@reddit
Not having to think about legal issues when writing patches or combining libraries.
DFS_0019287@reddit
That's a developer use-case, not an "average person" use-case.
BosonCollider@reddit
Disagree. I want to use ZFS as a regular user and it is an extreme PITA that the GPL is interpreted by its authors to be incompatible with it, while the BSD license is permissive enough that I can download freebsd with zfs linked in.
The GPL is bad for integration because it assumes that everything else that is copyleft has to have a convert-to-GPL clause or be abandoned.
non-existing-person@reddit
CDDL (ZFS license) was SPECIFICALLY written to not be compatible with GPL.
BosonCollider@reddit
Not true, by that standard the apache license would be too
non-existing-person@reddit
It's true. Apache is not compatible with gpl2. And with gpl3 it's only one way compatible. Licenses are a mess to be honest. I don't understand that shit. Like, you can include Apache in GPL3 code, but you can't include GPL3 code in Apache project.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Yes. GPL came first, and CDDL was made to prevent Linux (and I guess now, GNU Hurd) from ever getting it. The CDDL was designed to be hostile to the GPL.
DFS_0019287@reddit
That is a pretty niche thing, though I'll grant it to you.
Yes, the GPL is bad for "integration" in the way you describe, but that's by design. It's to keep someone from integrating away freedoms you might otherwise have.
BosonCollider@reddit
But the problem is not the license of ZFS, since that is also copyleft licensed. It is because the GPL assumes it is the only copyleft license
DFS_0019287@reddit
It is the problem of the license of ZFS. For two licenses to be incompatible, they both have to play a part in that incompatibility.
The GPL was there first. The drafters of the CDDL knew that it would be incompatible with the GPL but went ahead anyway:
https://lwn.net/Articles/114840/
BosonCollider@reddit
The patent peace protection is a freedom granted to the user, it can be granted by concatenating the licenses. Though it should have been part of the GPL 3.0 and wasn't
mfotang@reddit
You cannot blame the GPL for something that the owners of ZFS did: intentionally license ZFS to be incompatible with the GPL.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
it's a shame that zfs isn't under the MIT license then. If it was there would be no problems :)
teleprint-me@reddit
The GPL licenses are just there to make sure someone doesnt take the code and assume its just free labor (as in there was no cost) and takes the code and makes it proprietary so they solely benefit from someone elses work.
So, if your goal is to create proprietary software, then yes, the GPL is doing exactly what it was intended to do. To ensure end users have access to the source code. This is an intention stark contrast from proprietary licensing.
The contrast presented here is disingenuous as a result because the complaint is simply that: I cant use this code in my proprietary software, so the this license sucks.
As a result, this argument ends up as a myopic and dubious judgement.
If thats how you really feel about it, then just dont use GPL licensed software. Theres nothing wrong or evil about wanting to ensure that people have access to the source.
As an aside, the AGPL fixes the gap in the GPL when it comes down to remote execution as those licenses didnt account for that context.
Personally, I have nothing against permissive licenses like MIT, but Im very aware of what can happen as a result. This is why Im a heavy GPL user. If I dont care at all, then Ill use a MIT license, but its a rare event for me to do that.
Just do what feels right to you for yourself and the given context and be aware of the choices and consequences that follow as a result. This is, of course, easier said than done.
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
that was not the argument I was making. I reiterated multiple times that I license ALL my code as either MIT or Unlicense (or CC0 for assets). Public domain is not "proprietary"
GolemancerVekk@reddit
That's like saying that leaving a big bag of money on the street helps people more than donating it to charity.
You don't know that. You don't know how public domain code will be used and you have no control. Comparing it to any other license is nonsense.
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
but its not a "bag of money" you can't infinitely duplicate money. You can infinitely duplicate code... and while labor is the engine of all value, in many cases I do not care what is done with my output. I don't feel the need to control other people in that manner, if you can find benefit in something I did, then I have contributed to other people in society in the same manner they have contributed to me.
GolemancerVekk@reddit
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the value of code. It's not in the verbatim copies, it's in how you use it and what you can do with it. That's what the fundamental freedoms awarded by copyleft are all about. It's not just making sure you can duplicate code as it is now, it's about making sure you will still be able to use it and expand on it in the future.
MIT/BSD licenses can't do that. They don't care. You don't care.
Uh uh. And I'm sure you don't have walls on your house, or doors, or have any expectation from other people. You're perfectly ok with them doing whatever they want to you and yours.
Fireforge2@reddit
The irony is that this is the exact reasoning the led Linus to refuse to move to GPL3 from GPL2 for the Linux kernel, and yet now people are saying that this is an example of moving away from the old ways of Linux.
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
oh thats interesting, I wasn't even really aware of that.
teleprint-me@reddit
The issue Im presenting is this: I can take your code, make proprietary software out of it, then never owe you or any end users anything. I dont have to give anything back to you or your users or even disclose that information.
There are plenty of examples where creative commons or public domain rights have been ripped away from the public for private gain.
Hopefully this clearly and concisely illustrates the primary issue and motivation behind the GPL licenses.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
I'm a developer and i've talked to a lot of developers and I stopped asking this question because the answer to the question is "that's fine".
teleprint-me@reddit
Friends dont make friends feel bad about caring about other people.
If you want to enforce other individual rights, thats fair. I think thats a very natural feeling to have.
We do need money to survive in this world, so if you need to make it proprietary, then be upfront about it. Just be aware youll need to do it all from scratch.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
I didn't suggest anybody involved here were friends or not. It's just people I've talked to.
teleprint-me@reddit
Your words, righr? Theyre not your friends. Dont listen to them if they cant empathize with you. Dont let them make you feel bad for being empathic.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
they weren't friends.. just fellow developers.
teleprint-me@reddit
Its cool. I was trying to type out what I meant, but it kept falling apart. I should have left it at that. Its easy to mess up expression and intent via text.
Kobymaru376@reddit
Just making your code GPL gives you zero protection from that. If anyone violates GPL, you get a ticket to a lawsuit so congratulations if you're a lawyer and want to spent years on case. If you're just a sole developer, you'll get screwed by anyone with a bigger pocket than you anyway.
teleprint-me@reddit
In most cases, permissive licensing performs a release of liability unless other restrictions are imposed (e.g. the BSD protects the copyright holder).
But anyone can take anything from the public domain or creative commons (assuming its not a non-derivative and or non-commercial) and then reuse it for private or proprietary use.
The MIT and others tiered below it for permissive licensing are usually just a release of liability.
There's a reason why businesses migrate away from GPL or strictly licensed software. They don't want the legal issues you're alluding to.
IANAL, so feel free to share a source and I'll take a look at it. It took me a long time to wrap my head around licensing, intellectual property, trademarks, etc. because of how much goes into it. I learn something new all the time as a result.
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
I don't have trouble understanding the motivation, and I made a concession in my original post about this use case in regards to things like compression libs, kernels, etc... you're kind of just talking past me.
Sataniel98@reddit
I always use LGPL on libraries/APIs and GPL on implementations. This resolves every complaint people could legitimately have about GPL IMO
Nightlark192@reddit
Except when static linking an LGPL library and then needing to provide a way for users to relink.
DFS_0019287@reddit
That is not hard. You just provide the object files and a script to link with the library.
Nightlark192@reddit
Its less about difficulty and more being one more thing that must be tested to ensure it works.
The other issue I personally have isn’t technical as much as the additional burden to potential users that might make it less appealing to use libraries I’ve made. If it’s a library that people could be static linking against, then you’re basically forced to license your library under the LGPL since everyone using your library will also need adhere to those same requirements imposed by the transitive dependency.
However I understand that a lot of people here may disagree with that view, since they lean more towards guaranteeing user freedoms to relink and ensuring modifications are open sourced.
(The last bit is more specific to the company I work for, but releasing software as open source seems to get a bit more scrutiny from the reviewers whenever a dependency is LGPL licensed.)
SweetBabyAlaska@reddit
thats genuinely an interesting solution!
Mediocre-Pumpkin6522@reddit
Exactly. My personal example is with Expect. We could use it in a project since it was straight public domain. I found a bug it the sigsetjmp() implementation and submitted a patch to Don Libes that was included in the next release. Our product was proprietary software and we wouldn't touch GPL to the point of writing clean room implementation of a few common GNU utilities.
Eric Raymond has addressed the problem at length.
Particular_Pizza_542@reddit
These are all examples of the GPL working as intended.
GPL prioritizes the freedom of the code, and not the freedom of the developers. You/your company had to re-implement it (i.e. spend money) because for legal reasons you couldn't use the GPL'd version(which to be clear is fine).
This gives a competitive edge to people or companies who CAN use the GPL. That's the entire point of it. It levels the playing field between huge corporations and solo developers.
Mediocre-Pumpkin6522@reddit
The corollary is developers in commercial companies will not use GPL code, find bugs, and submit bug reports or fixes. Yes, it is an example of what Stallman intends with his legalism. Perhaps that is why many important projects use the MIT, 0-clause BSD, and other licenses.
DFS_0019287@reddit
Yes, we see that no developers in commercial companies use the Linux kernel, find bugs, or submit bug reports or fixes. 🙄
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
I'll mention the above is a /s comment, for those that don't recognize sarcasm on their own.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Exactly. You want to write for evil for profit corporations who make proprietary products and they don't want to share the code, then shut up and just be evil. Don't complain about it.
non-existing-person@reddit
More like freedom for the end user - no freedom of the code. Stallman was pissed at his printer and the fact he couldn't modify it so it could work. And that's how GPL was born xd
Particular_Pizza_542@reddit
Yes, right. It's code and end-user freedom instead of developer freedom.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
That's when happens when you write software for evil.
Alduish@reddit
About the non copyleft licenses I don't think it's the "linux way" or not, as long as it's FOSS it's good for me. Copyleft is more of a personal opinion, should we force the whole world to be FOSS or should we let users have full freedom even if it's for reusing our code on a closed source project. (I think the second option is completely fine too since it's all about freedom)
About the man pages, yeah I'm not a fan of it, man pages are super convenient and more readable than -h thanks to my pager and me being used to it, cli and tui apps should always have man pages IMO, and even more : they should get inspired by aerc which has all its documentation as man pages, but the last point isn't agreed by everyone and I get why it's not always the case.
nicman24@reddit
What is worse is their tooling only working with docker or something. It is infuriating especially if you need to run it in a system with older glibc
the_bighi@reddit
We don't need to stick to a philosophy created when people still had dinosaurs as pets.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Ah, to be young and know nothing... so simple a time.
the_bighi@reddit
Learning doesn’t mean repeating. History is not a prison. We can do better.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Oh god. Okay. There was a time that UNIX was all gobbled up by corporations like AT&T, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others. All were commercial. That BSD eeked out an existence amid it all was damn lucky. Those companies made it all proprietary. The OS, the compilers, all of it, and charged a hell of a lot for it.
The GPL came to free us all from that. And it worked. And it's damn near destroyed UNIX market share.
MIT license gets rid of the protections you get from the GPL, allowing companies to take it and sell it without guarantying you the right to the code. This allows them to take it, make changes to it, and then sell it without you ever getting to see their custom code. Now... they do that to the core utils, and oh my! They have this brand new "better" linux you should try! But you can't rebuild it yourself. You can't patch it. I mean, you could under the license... if you had the code. But they chose not to share it with you. And oh, they make a software or game that you just love, but require their Linux distro with their custom core utils... Now you're stuck. Vendor lock in. The return of the UNIX wars.
Learn from the past! Companies are NOT your friend! They wan't you renting everything from the OS's you use, the car you drive, to the air you breath. The GPL is one small yet powerful protection from someone other than you renting out your idea off of your hard work.
What is wrong with you people? You're like horses with blinders on.
siddemo@reddit
Exactly. Why don't people understand this? Companies are the destroyers of freedom, open source, and the commons. Look at the "right to repair" wars going on now to get a glimpse of Linux's future.
MatchingTurret@reddit
Complaining about "MIT and similar licenses ... abandoning the “older” ways of Linux and maybe even unix" is silly. MIT and BSD licenses were used by X and BSD . They formed the bedrock of the older ways.
GolemancerVekk@reddit
Until the GPL software took over. Where is BSD now?
Kobymaru376@reddit
In network hardware, in game consoles, on many critical devices that we haven't heard of, runnig loads of internet services ...
GolemancerVekk@reddit
Did you mean "mythical"?
WildCard65@reddit
PS5 is based on FreeBSD
GolemancerVekk@reddit
And it's a closed, commercial, proprietary platform. Hence OP's point.
If we want things to stay open they need to use licenses that enforce openness.
Giving things away and hoping for the best will just get you taken for a chump. You know how people are.
Coffee_Ops@reddit
Not everyone wants to use the GPL and that's okay. You can certainly just not use their software, if you'd like.
GolemancerVekk@reddit
There is no "BSD network fabric" in the Linux kernel. How could there be? The licenses are incompatible.
What else is running out there? Do you think there's any significant number of BSD or UNIX servers left?
jameson71@reddit
I honestly don’t think “network fabric” would exist without BSD network code
proton_badger@reddit
Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff, notable contemporary examples: X11, Python, Mesa, OpenSSL, SQLite and the original sudo -> permissive.
For an example of what happens when a company tries to grab a permissive project see redis/valkey and how terrible regrets were/are felt by the company as a result.
Personally I’m completely fine with utils/tools like uutils being MIT but I also think it is good that COSMIC DE is GPL.
cudatox@reddit
If the author of the program is willing to put the effort into writing it, it is their right to choose MIT/BSD over GPL even if it may mean getting Jeff'd by a big company in the future.
Not everyone agrees with the ethos of the GPL, there are some that would consider it to be a non-free license because of the requirement to share the source code.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Then they don't belong in a Linux distro.
cudatox@reddit
I wouldn't want to use a distro that tries to dictate what I can and cannot install based on what is or is not GPL.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Who said you can't install it? I said it doesn't belong in the distro. You can add whatever you want after the OS is installed. Do you understand English?
Ok-Salary3550@reddit
Ok, I wouldn’t want to use a distro that doesn’t come with non-GPL software, then. And it is my choice whether or not to use one.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Well, yes. You are free to make mistakes, unfortunately.
Particular_Pizza_542@reddit
And that's totally fine if those people understand what they're doing and making a conscious choice. But there's definitely community trends in licenses where people will just copy what they see other people doing. The fact is that GPL is really only worth a damn with a critical mass of code. There needs to be that bedrock of GPL that you can build on for it to be worth it, because in a way it does fracture the extant code bases into "GPL" and "not GPL". I think GPL is a victim of its own success where people see what it gave them, the public cloud, and a billion companies contributing to open source, and consuming open source - and think that all happened naturally out of the goodness of a corporation's heart. You don't even really need to go that far back to see when proprietary code was the standard, IBM AT&T Oracle Solaris. That's the world we would be in now if Linux and the GPL didn't succeed. And we would all be worse off for it, too.
small_kimono@reddit
How? There has always been BSD and MIT licensed code in your Linux distribution.
Alternatively, what happened is that -- the GPL lost mindshare among the developer class. For example, a developer moves to a new job, and she can't use her old code anymore, because her old GPL3 licensed code will infect an entirely new project. Or the LGPL doesn't work for the way her code is linked, because it may infect an entirely new project.
As much as developers may love OSS, practical developers accept that some code will be proprietary, or, at the very least, they won't have the power to pick the license. In those situations, MIT and BSD and MPL2 look pretty appealing, because they don't have the reinvent the wheel re: their old code.
Mother-Pride-Fest@reddit
Small clarification - the GPL is 100% free for the users, it does not restrict any use or modification. Its obligation to share the source code only applies once you redistribute the software to others. It's about making sure others have the same freedoms you have, not restricting what you can do with software.
OkDesk4532@reddit
Man pages were born in a time where you had no memory to build the texts into your binaries (for a say "-h" parameter). man pages are not a "Linux way". Moreover, there is no "Linux way". Maybe there is a UNIX way (that says that every program's output might be another program's input - thus never change the output format, even if the tool is 40 years old). HTH
Particular_Pizza_542@reddit
Man pages are searchable. They provide offline documentation, usage examples, notes on usage, interesting historical data, synopses for common patterns.
They're API docs, they're categorized and ordered. Frankly I think if you have this opinion you don't read documentation much. Because they're so obviously useful I just don't see how you couldn't rely on them.
If you ever program to the C or Unix API or want to read about a syscall, it's all just right there. You don't have to bookmark a webpage or check stack overflow or read standards docs in PDF.
zacker150@reddit
Literally everything you said also applies to HTML based docs. HTML docs also have the advantage of looking nice.
WildCard65@reddit
How do you even search man pages if you don't even know what the name of the api/program/library you even want.
Prior-Advice-5207@reddit
man -k <term>, or view them all at once with-a.man manis your friend!Particular_Pizza_542@reddit
apropos
WildCard65@reddit
?
acdcfanbill@reddit
It's a command
https://linux.die.net/man/1/apropos
WildCard65@reddit
This is what I mean, didn't even know this existed and googling just the word gave the definition at the top which did not help in the slightest.
acdcfanbill@reddit
Yeah, I could see why just googling it without anything else would only return dictionary things, but googling apropos linux gives, me at least, useful info.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Books! Get Unix in a Nutshell for starters.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Your home or office library is obviously very incomplete, then. Here:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/unix-in-a/0596100299/re879.html
Might I recommend you buy or subscribe to the O'Reilly books. It's where those starting out can learn things, but at the same time, they serve as a constant helpful source material.
Particular_Pizza_542@reddit
IDK man apply some critical thinking here.
Megame50@reddit
Absolutely this. Can't believe some of the replies I'm reading in this thread.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Reading is something some people don't value, unfortunately.
archiekane@reddit
New devs are just asking Claude, they don't need no stinking man pages.
/s just in case.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Then have Claude write you a man page.
antifa-pewpew@reddit
RTF... Screw it, just Google it:(
Particular_Pizza_542@reddit
I mean, I know you're joking, but fair. I guess manpages are good if you want to know how shit actually works and the foundations of how things are built. To be honest, most people don't know and don't care. If you're just building APIs for your job then you don't care about syscalls or socket programming or that syscall manpages are in a different directory than program manpages.
Nightlark192@reddit
The first place I tend to look for things like API docs or help (aside from a -h option) is the project website or README for links, then a google search… which for Linux utilities often turns up an online version of the man page. Only rarely do I end up having to turn to the offline man pages.
OkDesk4532@reddit
That is what man pages became. They were "manual pages" prior. And "man " evolved on top of that. But you're right. Man pages are pretty helpful when hacking ie. syscall stuff and you are just left off with the offline machine and no Browser and internet. Still have them all installed in English language, as they're the most reliable language version when it comes to development.
ilep@reddit
The manpages can be managed separately so that you don't need to rebuild your code when you fix a typo somewhere in docs. And manpages can have much much longer details than you can reasonably maintain behind -h flag.
Also, -h flag does not really work with something like documenting system calls or different libraries your frontend program might use.
As a bonus, thanks to the way manpages are formatted, you can generate HTML and other formats from the same tex source.
yvrelna@reddit
You don't need to do that with built-in documentation either. It's not uncommon to put the -h message in a separate file, which can be updated separately from the program.
antifa-pewpew@reddit
And your comment is just about what's wrong with linux end users.
The best Linux system utilities come with a man page and a -h
Now get off my lawn
imwearingyourpants@reddit
And do one thing and one thing only - and do it well
FuckHumans_WriteCode@reddit
cough cough systemd cough cough
OkDesk4532@reddit
Exactly that!
thefanum@reddit
Linux isn't Unix, it isn't posix, and it's never intended to be.
Systemd is the best thing that's happened to Linux in a decade
dddurd@reddit
EU should force GPLv3 on smart software, instead of chat control.
FryBoyter@reddit
To be honest, I don't think much of dictating a specific license. In the worst case, this can lead to certain software not being developed at all.
What's more, you could probably spend forever discussing which license to dictate. For example, why the GPL and not the AGPL, which prevents the ASP loophole?
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
I prefer v2, but I could get behind forcing v2 and v3 as the only choices.
Difficult_Pop8262@reddit
what
deadlyrepost@reddit
Sadly the "rewrite it in Rust" crowd are also the MIT / Apache licensing crowd. I fear our GPL days are behind us, and with it, our freedoms.
imwearingyourpants@reddit
Yep, Linux is going to get monetized even harder soon... Once the coreutils are MIT licensed, things will get ugly.
rebootyourbrainstem@reddit
How do you see that playing out, exactly? Somebody making a proprietary fork of coreutils and asking for money?
deadlyrepost@reddit
I expect more "tivoisation", where companies ship a Linux but with changes, and essentially do an embrace extend extinguish.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Those downvoting you are either corporate shills, or too young to remember the UNIX wars.
Thaufas@reddit
100%! I know multiple scientific software companies that would love nothing more than the GPL to be eradicated in favor of non-copy left licenses.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Yep! Apparently educators have been pointing young minds in the corporate servitude direction again.
deadlyrepost@reddit
The PS3 has a BSD kernel IIRC. As a user or a customer, we have no rights or access to it. The downvoters don't see a problem with that.
It's like people say: Linux users are the vegans of the computing world, but they think we're just inviting them to the vegan restaurants and complaining there's no meat, not that we're asking them to actually become vegan.
imwearingyourpants@reddit
Nope, but if you check the license for the new Ubuntu coreutils, they are MIT licensed: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/LICENSE
Ask this: If they are happy with how things are right now, why is there a new license instead of just doing what they've always done?
teleprint-me@reddit
Yes, lol. It happens all the time.
Particular_Pizza_542@reddit
Linux grew in an environment of GPL to become the most prolific software on earth. It clearly was not encumbering to use and deal with the GPL.
The GPL enabled everything you see today in the public cloud and corporate world.
A switch away clearly stands to only benefit corporations at everyone else's expense. Ditching the GPL is a coordinated effort by companies to try and control all software again.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
you do know that the bsds have had permissively licensed equivalents for 30+ years right. Nothing bad has happened because of this.
The thing about the coreutils is that they have many substitutes. There will be no problems from coreutils being permissively licensed.
However, there will likely be a serious problem if the linux kernel went that way. Luckily that can't really happen.
imwearingyourpants@reddit
A very good point, where I would counter by the enormous market-share difference that BSD and Linux have. BSD does not have any existing user-base to start milking for money.
Kobymaru376@reddit
How exactly are your freedoms gone? And if you want your freedoms that badly, why didn't you write those tools and make them GPL?
VividGiraffe@reddit
I mean, look at who founded and sits on the rust foundation. They’re certainly not foss advocates.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
Lots of the stack had already had linking exceptions like glibc OR under those permissive licenses like xorg and mesa.
Then you have entire distributions that use clang for their compiler and musl for their libc.
DHermit@reddit
I don't understand this sentiment. There always have been plenty of tools from the BSDs used widely in Linux, which have similar licensing.
ZamiGami@reddit
More people than ever use Linux today, new users and developers bring in new ways of doing things and we may not like all of it, but all of it is necessary if we want to grow rather than stagnate. Unless we want to gate keep Linux forever as an enthusiast super nerds only system, we need to be flexible and accept that sometimes things won't go entirely our way.
What the 'Linux way' is changes as Linux itself changes, and that change may not always be pretty or preferable. Support, contribute and donate to things you want to see more of, it's all we can do.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
That's a lot of words to say, "sell out".
antifa-pewpew@reddit
man systemd
Ah, crap...
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Isn't that systemctl start man systemd ?
crusoe@reddit
Honestly without some sort of typed streams the "Linux way" never really worked. Sure you could pipe. But then you needed cut and sort and all kinds of esoteric syntax to try and assemble stuff. Posix streams and bash are anemic and barely suitable for the job, hamstrung by the need for backwards compatibility.
I'd rather have a handful of robust tools than dozens of kinda crappy ones
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Found the windows guy.
crusoe@reddit
Honestly powershell has a somewhat better model.
If the tools could agree on some kind of json output format we would have a much better world. This is not the 60s anymore.
thephotoman@reddit
Let’s talk a bit about the decline of copyleft.
Right now, the biggest proponent of copyleft, the Free Software Foundation, is compromised. It has a code of conduct it cannot enforce, and that’s been clear since RMS returned to leadership at the FSF after being forced out for his multiple public statements in favor of sexually abusing children (there’s no evidence he’s ever done so, but those comments are an impediment to the FSF’s mission, simply because they are so outrageous and inseparable from RMS). As such, it’s hard for me to see the FSF as anything other than an extension of RMS the person.
That’s a problem, because RMS is mortal. He’s 72. And when the personality around which a cult is centered dies, so does the cult. And if the FSF weren’t Stallman’s cult of personality, it wouldn’t have accepted him back as a leader after expelling him.
That’s a problem for the GPL, as someone will be able to buy the FSF upon Stallman’s death. And who knows what nonsense they’d put in a GPLv4. Stallman undermines his own organization now.
DFS_0019287@reddit
I produce GPL'd software, but I always pick a specific version of the GPL and I don't say "... or later". That protects you from changes to the GPL.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
It also makes your code incompatible (even for linking) with future FSF code and other code that will be released as "version 4 or later", which can in the worst case make it unusable.
DFS_0019287@reddit
My software packages are stand-alone programs, not libraries, and they don't make heavy use of other libraries, so I can live with that.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
As it should be. Good work.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
Still prevents code reuse.
DFS_0019287@reddit
No, it doesn't. People are completely free to reuse my code... as long as they license the result under the same GPL version.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
Neither can they reuse your code in their future GPLv4+ programs, nor can their code be reused in modified versions of your GPLv3 only (or GPLv2 only) program.
DFS_0019287@reddit
That is fine. I'm willing to live with that tradeoff.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
This is not a matter of what you are willing to live with, but a matter of what everyone else is willing to live with. Using the GPL without the "or later" clause is just antisocial and stupid (and yes, I also blame Linus Torvalds there).
DFS_0019287@reddit
It's my choice. The author of the software gets to pick the license. Others don't get a say.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
That is a very proprietary attitude.
DFS_0019287@reddit
No, it's simply a fact. The people who write the software own the copyright and they get to decide the license. Nothing proprietary about that, if it's an open-source license.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
Yes, it is your legal right to license your software that way. Just like it is Microsoft's or Adobe's or NVidia's legal right to put a proprietary license on theirs. Does not make it any less antisocial.
DFS_0019287@reddit
So are you saying the only non-"antisocial" software is public domain? I disagree. And I think you're actually full of sh..
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
No, I am saying that picking a copyleft license without the future-proofing clause that that license has for a reason is antisocial.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
It doesn't even matter what stallman did or didn't do though. Even if those concerns were never brought up, that'd still be an existing problem. It'd just be easier to ignore.
Electrical_Tomato_73@reddit
About licensing, if there is a Unix way, GPL is not it. MIT (which is similar to 2-clause BSD) is closer to Unix. It is just as free as GPL according to the FSF and software using these licences since the 1980s are still in wide use.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
We don't want to return to the UNIX wars. No!
danbuter@reddit
Considering a LOT of modern linux is developed by IBM (via RedHat), Oracle, and Canonical, I'm surprised the situation isn't even worse.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
They needed a new reason to do it that people would fall for hook line and sinker. Oh, a programming language that protects against common memory exploits? Well you have to let us re-write everything in that for your safety, right? I mean, you just have to! Oh, and now that it's far enough along for y'all to notice... we left out the GPL. You're boned. Linux is ours now. And like systemd and wayland, if you stick with your older GPL stuff, things are going to start breaking as me make everything juuuuuust incompatible enough for you to go back. You're wecome! Now pay us, biznatches!
IAmSnort@reddit
I use systemd-browserd to go on the internet. I play videos with systemd-mediad. I manage my pictures with systemd-photod.
It's all very linux.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
I see you use the new systemd-sarcasmd.
GloWondub@reddit
As a maintainer I see two things:
A good help (as in --help) is more important than a man because man is not cross platform, --help is. That being said, using help2man is easy enough so let's just use it.
Open source projects using MIT instead of GPL doesn't restrict your freedom to use the project at all, it even let other (companies that want to put projects in their tools yet not be open source) also use it. It's a difference of mentality but it means more usage, not less usage.
QuickSilver010@reddit
Thief: Oh no. Not the no stealing sign. I guess I can't steal anymore.
You think a malicious actor will care what the license of a project is? And do you think you will ever find out they did took your code?
Cold_Soft_4823@reddit
As a technical writer by trade, I'd love for someone to point me in the direction of software that doesn't have documentation or a man page so I have something to do in my free time.
MrMeshok@reddit
I often find myself wanting man page for Gamescope. Now the only way to see keybinds is to read online readme
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Oh man, just swim around Github. There are plenty.
DFS_0019287@reddit
I agree. Not including a man page to me says your software is not finished, or you don't care about quality.
I also regret that so many projects are avoiding the GPL.
QuickSilver010@reddit
I disagree as someone who made a small program with a -h description. Everything is already under -h so I don't see why I should make a man page.
RunOrBike@reddit
To me, manpages are like licensed amateur radio. An really interesting hobby, but not needed under normal conditions: Just picking up the phone is a lot easier.
Except when things go south (and they tend to do very quickly under some circumstances like floods), these people keep up the most important infrastructure: Comms.
Perhaps it’s because I can remember a time without cell phones, internet and constant connectivity, but to me, manpages are an important part of desaster preparation. Should I no longer be able to lookup the manual of a program on the internet, a quick glance at a well-written manpage is all I need.
einpoklum@reddit
It is actually hard to write GPL code. That is, not the coding itself, but to avoid a situation where you have obligations or pressures which prevent you from making your program GPL.
In my case, for example, two of my projects started out from code others had wrote, which was not GPL, and for reasons of project continuity, the license stayed. In another case, I was writing code as a post-doc at a research institute, and was not allowed to license it under GPL.
In other cases still, when you're writing libraries - GPL is not really possible, and LGPL is quite different from the full GPL.
But - TBH, this post has made me consider possibly switching some code of mine from 3BSD to LGPL.
VividGiraffe@reddit
lol, look at OP with his “values”.
What’s important is being more popular than windows.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Who cares about windows? It's not a popularity contest. And we don't need (or even desire) it's devs and users. You have a beautiful garden we call Linux, and you want them to come here and crap all over it?
SeeMonkeyDoMonkey@reddit
Change happens.
IT seems a fast-moving field, but it's still an immature field^† - there will be more big changes to come, in both technology and economics.
Hopefully we can recognise the benefits of change when they arise, and not to let ideas like "UNIX philosophy" (whichever of the various interpretations one subscribes to) get in the way of adapting to the changing landscape.
^† I think the rising importance of memory-safe languages may mark the end of it's infancy.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Uh, the "UNIX philosophy" is how you got the nice things you have today. Without it, the tech you love right now wouldn't even be here.
0riginal-Syn@reddit
I mean, in the spirit of FOSS/Linux, if you are worried about missing man pages, the great thing is you can contribute and fix that if you wish. That is more in line with the spirit of FOSS than complaining that other devs are not doing something. You are using it for free. If you see a need, fill it. You don't even have to know code to help with it.
Trust me, contributing does a lot more than complaining about what devs are not doing with the free software you are taking advantage of.
As far as the licensing, I do prefer the GPL license and it is what I use on my projects. I do have some slight concerns with it on core systems, but I do not see it as a real issue because of how FOSS and the Linux ecosystem work. But, even if tiny, there is a concern there.
DFS_0019287@reddit
I don't agree with your take on "don't complain if someone doesn't include a man page."
I develop and maintain several free software (GPL'd) packages. They all contain man pages and I spend a lot of effort making sure the documentation is complete, up-to-date and readable. To me, this is simply part of taking pride in one's work. Just because I give away my software for free doesn't mean I should accept inferior quality compared to software I'm paid to write.
To write software, throw it over the wall with no documentation, and then tell people "if you don't like it, contribute back" is perfectly fine from a licensing point of view, but it betrays a lack of pride in your work and (to me, anyway) indicates software that probably isn't worth using.
0riginal-Syn@reddit
That is certainly your right to do as a developer of your packages, but that does not mean that every developer has to feel the same way, or they may not have time. I always put man pages for my projects before the full functional release. It is not mine or your job to tell another developer how to release their open-source code. We do not know their situation.
That said, I can appreciate your opinion, and mine is just different. I started back before Linux, and yeah, man pages were pretty much a requirement. You didn't have much alternative. Now there are movements to even move from man pages to other systems. It is not the same as it once was.
Original_Two9716@reddit
Linux is new Windows
Level-Suspect2933@reddit
like what?
jasisonee@reddit
uutils is trying to replace GNU coreutils, the probably second most popular copyleft software project.
its_a_gibibyte@reddit
Yep. Uutils specifically doesnt allow code from coreutils because they're trying to rewrite it without the GPL.
purpleidea@reddit
It's one of their main reasons for existing. Big corporate wants even less copyleft in the stuff they consume for free.
This project would be more stable if they ported GNU tools stepwise in the same code base, but they didn't want copyleft.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
THIS, exactly. It's all corporate undermining of Linux.
ChocolateDonut36@reddit
yeah the absense of man pages is sad but last last time I used one was to remember how to use the dd command.
I guess if we made a GUI tool to read man pages they could still be relevant today
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Why a GUI to present text?
pfmiller0@reddit
I use them multiple times a day. In what way are man pages no longer relevant?
Kobymaru376@reddit
That's called a browser. You can go too google.com and search for any manpage in existance.
DFS_0019287@reddit
There are GUI man page readers such as xman and yelp (use "yelp man:the_man_page")
cmrd_msr@reddit
If people are willing to invest in Linux, I don't care. Until billions of corporate dollars started pouring into Linux, it was pitifully marginal.
thephotoman@reddit
Red Hat and Caldera were pouring serious money into Linux back in the 1990’s. The era before corporate contributions was quite brief.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Don't forget, Red Hat and Suse, in cooperation with IBM, even brought Linux to the Z series mainframes.
loozerr@reddit
Pitifully marginal? So what?
cmrd_msr@reddit
It worked poorly. Even 20 years ago, you couldn't just install Linux on your machine. You had to build a Linux machine specifically because drivers were available for very few hardware components. It was a very niche product for geeks, much like Linux is for phones now. I'm glad times have changed. It's for everyone's benefit.
FrostyDiscipline7558@reddit
Well that's a lie. Rarely had a box that had issues running Linux, and I managed hundreds.
gosand@reddit
I call bullshit. I've been using Linux only on my machine since 1998. Yes, it's improved a lot since then, buy you could absolutely install in on and run it without problems.
DFS_0019287@reddit
Nope. I did "just install" Linux on many machines 20 years ago.
BosonCollider@reddit
Same. Ubuntu was the new kid on the block and was easy to get started with.
bobthebobbest@reddit
That was corporate investment.
FortuneIIIPick@reddit
Same. Ubuntu, before that SUSE, Fedora, etc.
loozerr@reddit
In 2005? Yeah you could, though you better have had Intel or nvidia gpu. And had to mess with ndiswrapper in some cases.
cmrd_msr@reddit
More like 1999. My timekeeping is a bit off. Before Red Hat, Intel, and IMM started investing fully.
Razathorn@reddit
I remember picking NIC based on chipset at best buy, as well as graphics cards. That feeling when startx came up and you had 1024x768 in full color depth and windowmaker gradient title bars and glossy app icons looked good. Wooooo buddy it was time to download an xmms skin and start play'n that ripped korn album. Should I use netscape navigator GOLD or this new mozilla thing. Sheeeet dawg. Quake world with PS2 mouse, here I come!
bastardoperator@reddit
When exactly was that? Billions have never poured into Linux, in fact quite the opposite. Corporations provide marginal resources for their own bidding, then claim to fund OSS while taking all the money back to shareholders, even the developers don’t make a dime outside of their salary.
cmrd_msr@reddit
Red Hat alone invested almost a billion in 2025.
einpoklum@reddit
Link please. What did RedHat invest in, exactly?
Also, AFAIK, most developers can't make a living from the Linux development work.
rebootyourbrainstem@reddit
We are getting an excellent and rapidly improving kernel for free, and the core Linux kernel devs are getting a paycheck, and you are complaining about what, exactly? That companies make profit? Oh no.
twilight-actual@reddit
I blame rust devs.
Quick_Cow_4513@reddit
What's wrong with MIT licence? MIT and BSD are true free licenses that actually gives you freedom to use the code as you want.
How can steal something that it voluntarily given to you?
guxtavo@reddit
Too vague. Give examples.
billyfudger69@reddit
sudo vs sudo-rs
Both are Sudo but in different languages (C and Rust respectively) they should be doing the same thing and yet the Rust version uses the MIT license instead of the GPL license like the original sudo code does. Many other Rust rewrites also feature the MIT license instead of a GPL license.
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To me the rewrite and license change feels like a planned maneuver to have developers write this amazing software in C for everyone to use then rewrite it in Rust under the MIT license which means corporations don’t have to contribute back any of their work on the project. Basically it benefits those who have the resources to fix, maintain, and add features to our software but it does not benefit the common good of the community.
TLDR: FOSS should benefit everyone. Free the software.
Hot-Employ-3399@reddit
Original sudo is ISC-like, which is basically MIT and definitely not GPL.
gmes78@reddit
Sudo does not use the GPL.
throwaway6560192@reddit
GPL allows one to fork and sell access to the fork too. This is a non-concern in most cases, because there is no one out there who wants to fork your specific tool and add something to it and then sell it.
jameson71@reddit
Been that way for 10 years+. When RMS was discredited the movement died unfortunately.
DFS_0019287@reddit
No, there are other forces at play, such as powerful corporations being hostile to the GPL (and even more hostile to the AGPL) because those licenses interfere with those corporations' business models.
jameson71@reddit
Yep. These are the forces RMS fought against
Kobymaru376@reddit
Linus has always been considered an "eccentric", but not in the same way as RMS. Linus just likes to flame people for shit code, otherwise he's a reasonable person.
RMS is just... RMS. The movement was never going to grow beyond a small niche cult.
jameson71@reddit
Which is sad because everything he said regarding software is being proven correct
calinet6@reddit
Agree. Also diverging from the consistency and predictability of stdin/stdout and piping convention. It often is highly inconvenient.
HonAnthonyAlbanese@reddit
FreeBSD had survived and thrived with its licensing.
systemd will always suck though.
varsnef@reddit
You used to find GNOME or KDE on everything almost. BSD, Solaris, something else... Now they are starting to need systemd.
It's sad to see a trend to "Linux only" software.
the_abortionat0r@reddit
I'll never understand you anti SystemD weirdos. It's purely an emotional hang up you need to drop.
HonAnthonyAlbanese@reddit
journalctl -xeu service --no-pager ... vs a !@#$ log file.
systemd shite is like step one toward an agentic os
1369ic@reddit
How could somebody get emotional about a piece of software they didn't write, especially when they can get it, or not, free? It just tries to do too much. I think having a simple init system is a cleaner solution. Systemd is like a string of Christmas lights to me, when it should be a lot more like a light switch.
Euphoric-Bunch1378@reddit
Just because they have an extensive software suite in addition to the init system, doesn't mean you are forced to use their other components.
1369ic@reddit
That might be a worthwhile option, but every distro I ever tried that had systemd seemed to use its components. Why wouldn't they? And because it's Linux, there are distros without systemd and already have other components installed. Why wouldn't I use that?
foreverf1711@reddit
It's mostly people who say automatically "old = good, new = bad" with no reason for it. Like, I don't care if systemd breaks the philosophy of a 50 year old system nobody uses anymore.
Polskihammer@reddit
You don't have to use systemd if you don't want to. Nothing is lost if you have functional options
varsnef@reddit
The point was about explicitly requiring systemd without a choice. Just take a deep breath and relax.
TerribleReason4195@reddit
It is not really possible, or it would be really hard to put system on BSD because they are not linux and are completely different.
tripanossoma_cruzes@reddit
Thriving how?
TerribleReason4195@reddit
I don't know, but FreeBSD is doing great right now. FreeBSD 15 is going to have a desktop option in the installer. They are going to put rust in the drivers. Now there is a project for FreeBSD to be on laptops. Check the community out.
3X0karibu@reddit (OP)
I’m not sure I’d call the state freebsd is in thriving when compared to the wider Linux world, sony based its console operating system off of it and basically gave nothing in return
TerribleReason4195@reddit
You would be really surprised how much Sony gave back to FreeBSD. They do it privately though.
the_abortionat0r@reddit
Found the crazy hobo.
AnEagleisnotme@reddit
I would argue FreeBSD is barely scraping by considering it's importance, Linux as a whole is going significantly better, despite coming later, in large part thanks to it's license
lateralspin@reddit
man is traditionally a unix convention, but so what -- There used be a time when CHM was a convention of Microsoft Help, but like most Microsoft technologies, Microsoft keeps deprecating the technology that they introduced.
IntelligentSpite6364@reddit
You can often change that yourself by making a contribution
Intelligent_Comb_338@reddit
mmm, linux is free and therefore in my opinion there is no "more linux way" although maybe that's why I don't use linux, I prefer linux because it lets you do what you want to choose the application interface and everything, I did lfs and man was one of the things that I didn't install because I never use them even in common distros like arch or ubuntu, and I don't know what worries you, it's linux, there are more than a thousand programs that do the same thing
SteveHamlin1@reddit
Code use is not "malicious" and "stealing" if it complies with the terms of the license that the author specifically chose.
dkopgerpgdolfg@reddit
There were always bad products. The solution is to not bother. New bad products will disappear just the old ones did (the old ones are not remembered for a reason).
If a generally available CLI tool doesn't provide a man page, I'm a) going to doubt about the quality of the software itself, b) won't spend the time on looking into it more.
Instead I'll just use something that is well-made instead. Being new and shiny isn't a requirement for me; if an old program matches my actual requirements better then I'll use it.
(Man pages are just one of many examples)
AmarildoJr@reddit
Yeah no kidding. When we accepted systemd* it all went downhill from there - systemd doing MUCH more than promised (it can almost be called systemd/Linux nowadays), and now some developers are rushing for programs to be re-written in Rust (a technology that Microsoft invests in) for almost no reason nor true benefit, and with MIT licenses as base. The main developer for sytstemd is also a Microsoft employee.
We're literally failing to stop the "embrace and extinguish" part.
* I know systemd does a lot of things right, but that's not the point. The point is that it's doing way more than promised and becoming hard dependency. That's horrible not only in terms of control (if we ever need to fork it) but also as an attack vector.
Kobymaru376@reddit
This is such a ridiculous take.
Things are changing. People who have different values and priorities from you are making free software now. If you don't like those priorities and values, you don't have to use them! Just continue to use software from the "good old days" or make new software yourself according to your standards. But how can you expect everyone to cater to your will?
It's becoming a hard dependency because it is so good and because it makes developing software easier.
AmarildoJr@reddit
Ah, I see. My take is "ridiculous" (it's really not), but "swallow systemd or use distros from 15 years ago" is definitely OK, apparently.
Point me to where I have said that. If you can't: all I'm doing is questioning the absolute power that Poettering and Microsoft have over Linux, and how we're losing copyleft licenses on our software.
einpoklum@reddit
Not all of us accepted systemd, and - most of us can un-accept it, by choosing a systemd free distribution. At least for our PCs/laptops, possibly for work as well.
100GHz@reddit
It's okay. We must need to put all pages inside a snap inside a container. For easier update ofc.
popcorn
tangoshukudai@reddit
I have used linux since the mid 90s and I hate man pages. -h for life.
Megame50@reddit
In addition to lacking man pages, it's embarrassing how many large and "professional" projects have a meager and clunky cli tool with no useful shell completions provided.
chillykahlil@reddit
If it's a tool, MIT license, I want everyone and anyone to be allowed to use it, for whatever they need it for. We give to the small devs and accept that large corps might also take it.
A product, GPL. I want collaboration, I want the source shared, I want to show it off without the fear of corporate stealing.
This is my personal philosophy on the matter.
YouRock96@reddit
Just like many things Linux unfortunately loses the Unix-way
zquzra@reddit
There is a growing movement within the Linux ecosystem towards standardization and homogenization that I find difficult to comprehend and, frankly, believe to be a fundamental error.
This trend appears to be driven by a push for the forced popularization of Linux. Proponents of this movement operate under the belief that making Linux more mainstream would be an inherent good for everyone. They see a unified, standardized, and user-friendly experience, one that mirrors the seamlessness of proprietary systems, as the necessary path to achieve this mass adoption.
However, I contend that this approach will ultimately have the opposite effect. The very essence of Linux, in my view, lies in the unparalleled privacy and freedom it offers, qualities that are more viable here than in any alternative operating system. This drive for homogenization is often accompanied by a growing willingness to relax the strict licensing principles that have long protected these freedoms. We are witnessing a shift away from protective licenses like the GPL towards more permissive ones, such as the MIT and BSD licenses.
While these permissive licenses may facilitate easier corporate adoption and development, they also lower the barriers for the insertion of proprietary binary blobs and the creation of closed-source software for the Linux platform. This, in my view, is a slippery slope. I fear that the end result of this "popular Linux" will be a deceptively closed system, offering little in the way of genuine privacy or user freedom.
The core of the issue is a fundamental incompatibility. True popularization, in the modern tech landscape, seems to be at odds with the principles of liberty and privacy. A system that is genuinely open, free, and respectful of user privacy is commercially unviable for the dominant FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) business model. Their revenue streams are heavily reliant on targeted advertising, data harvesting, and ecosystem lock-in, practices that are intrinsically incompatible with a platform that users truly control.
Therefore, in the quest to make Linux popular, we risk sculpting it into a system that sacrifices the very soul that made it worth popularizing in the first place.
smallproton@reddit
Yeah, and it's the wide scale adoption of this newfangled "vi" thing which started it all.
Before vi, who wasn't happy with cat, sed and dd?
Schreq@reddit
Ed is the standard text editor.
sgtholly@reddit
The Linux Way™️ is to do it however you want and accept that different people do things different ways. It is letting the users decide what is valuable for them or not. Having different ways to do everything and supporting different opinions is the way. There is no single best anything.
Personally, man pages are about as useful as page 2 of Google. I prefer to not use Google, and when I do use Google, what I want better be on page 1. When I am desperate enough to get to page 2, I’m pretty hopeless.
WSuperOS@reddit
hard agree on the man pages, however it's one of those things anyone can fix with basically little to no programming skills
Userwerd@reddit
I second your point about MIT.
baltimoresports@reddit
Casino/Gambling. Seems like that's an endangered thing in games these days.
hisnameiselonmusk@reddit
I always use the GNU GPLv3.0 license instead of the MIT one