Rust Coreutils 0.8 has been released, bringing significant performance gains

[-]

JustBadPlaya@reddit

Good lord people here are delusional about the licensing change.

Yes, sure, GPL is what made Linux great. The difference is that for serious and evergrowing projects like OS kernels GPL makes a lot of sense - contributions from downstream may help with making the rest of the kernel better, or be helpful with preserving hardware or whatever. There is undeniably some merit to saying that without contributions from downstreams there wouldn't be Linux in a state it is.

However, that's very very far from universal.

A huge part of modern Linux userland is non-copyleft. Mesa is MIT+BSD, Wayland is MIT, Xorg is X11 (effectively MIT), sudo is ISC, curl is curl (effectively MIT, portions are ISC), harfbuzz is MIT, openssh is 0BSD, openssl is apache 2.0, zlib is zlib (effectively MIT). All these are established projects that are necessary for many linux setups, all of them see downstream contributions, and all of them are non-copyleft, and I don't see anyone running away from any of these. Hell, there was some idiotic outrage about sudo-rs being MIT-licensed because half of this subreddit never realised sudo itself was ISC already
For a lot of projects, corporate forking doesn't even make that much sense outside of explicitly malicious intent, and malicious developers would just ignore GPL anyway. What are they gonna do with coreutils? Unless they're adding a crypto miner to grep, there's not much that would make sense to add in a corporate private fork. There is genuinely just no incentive to make changes to something like uutils without contributing them upstream, especially once it reaches full output parity with GNU coreutils
MIT is a more portable license. In an incredibly ironic turn of events, a project that was started as an opportunity to learn now becomes a great opportunity to learn and reference code from, as it being under MIT means you don't need to worry about licensing when pushing your own crappyutils to a public git forge!

I swear, people take the whole MIT vs GPL thing at face value with exactly zero nuance required. Sometimes, it doesn't make much difference what license your software is under, as long as the source code is there and you can build it yourself. And coreutils is one of those cases

I do hope someone comes up with something akin to Lisp Lesser GPL aka LGPL with static linking exceptions similar to the existing dynamic linking ones, as this would solve a lot of problems I have with GPL for libraries

[-]

Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

Wayland is just a protocol and the implementations are usually GPL as their Desktops

And companies push licenses like MIT on projects for the costumer to make sure they can close the source of the most popular project (Chrome and Chromium) and sometimes add incompatibilities over the forks (check Visual Studio Code with Codium)

And the lack of limitations is the reason why the Android ecosystem is BS. Remove the GPLv3 and you get binaries preventing anyone from running whatever OS they want over their hardware. Hardware the customers bought. Funny enough that these limitations don't affect corporations with their servers' hardware

[-]

JustBadPlaya@reddit

wlroots and smithay are MIT, as well as some compositors

And companies push licenses like MIT on projects for the costumer to make sure they can close the source of the most popular project

ooooor sometimes developers want their projects to be used in Any Way Desireable and make libraries MIT, which is also common

[-]

FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

ooooor sometimes developers want their projects to be used in Any Way Desireable and make libraries MIT, which is also common

Friendly reminder that GPL-x is not compatible with GPL-y, except in one case (2-or-later to 3-or-later), nor with other copyleft licenses. MIT is.

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Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

Why wouldn't GPL 2 and 3 be compatible?

GPL3 only adds the limitation saying that the distributed software must be entirely open source. GPL2 doesn't goes against this

Linux distros are being distributed with GPL2 and 3 software without legal issues, there is no such incompatibility

Not just that but systemd is LGPL and every distros combines the GPL2 kernel with LGPL init system with a GPL3 core utils

The GPLv2 is incompatible with Apache 2.0, GPL3 isn't

BSD is also compatible with everything but people don't use It and it's less restrictive

[-]

FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

Why wouldn't GPL 2 and 3 be compatible?

There you go: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1777/why-is-gplv2-incompatible-with-gplv3

Linux distros are being distributed with GPL2 and 3 software without legal issues, there is no such incompatibility

This is not mixing source code distributed under different licenses.

You can also put a GPL-2-only project, a GPL-3-only project, and a MIT project in a Zip file, each project retains its license. If you actually wanted to create a derivative product of a GPL-2-only project and a GPL-2-or-later project, that you cannot do.

[-]

Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

First, no. Second, your info comes from a forum where other people already pointed out the info is wrong

But as all the info about the license comes from forums... Wait, It doesn't, GNU has a page explaining the license...

Who could Guess there license agreements are out there

Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.

It's important that the restrictions are not allowed if they affect the other given rights. This means that you can change GPLv2 to GPLv3 without issues. Torvalds was asked to without using a GPLv2 or later license. Guess why, because it's not needed at all

I already had a discussion a out the GPLv3 and ended reading It just to learn I was wrong. Now I show you that you are wrong. The GPLv2 allows more restrictions if they don't affect the given freedoms. Including blobs or patents aren't freedoms given explicitly by the GPLv2 license. Which proves you wrong

You can also put a GPL-2-only project, a GPL-3-only project, and a MIT project in a Zip file, each project retains its license.

Well check the GPLv3 license...

c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.

It deppends, does the Zip apps rely on each other? That could trigger this part of the license

[-]

FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

This is so much wrong, I do not even know where to start...

I will just address this:

This means that you can change GPLv2 to GPLv3 without issues.

Please stop spreading misinformation. You can only relicense GPL-2-or-later to GPL-3-or-later.

You cannot relicense GPL-2-only to anything, and neither you can with GPL-3-only (one should expect the -only suffix to be self-explanatory...). You cannot even relicense GPL-2-or-later to GPL-3-only.

Torvalds was asked to without using a GPLv2 or later license. Guess why, because it's not needed at all

Torvalds was asked to change the license exactly because it would be VERY MUCH needed. If the kernel was under GPL-2-or-later, then it could be relicensed as GPL-3-or-later, and Torvalds would not need to be involved at all. But it is under GPL-2-only, so it cannot.

He was asked to change the license, he declined (mostly because it had to get approval by every single contributor to the kernel, and some of them are even not between us anymore), and now the kernel is still GPL-2-only, and its code cannot be used in GPL-3-x projects (except small parts of the kernel, which are double-licensed under BSD).

It deppends, does the Zip apps rely on each other? That could trigger this part of the license

It is exactly what happens in distributions. Just because a distribution ships GNU Glibc (GPL-3-or-later) and Linux (GPL-2-only), it does not make the distribution itself a derived work of both.

[-]

Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

This is so much wrong, I do not even know where to start...

Yea because a quote from the GPLv3 license is fake...

He was asked to change the license, he declined (mostly because it had to get approval by every single contributor to the kernel, and some of them are even not between us anymore), and now the kernel is still GPL-2-only, and its code cannot be used in GPL-3-x projects (except small parts of the kernel, which are double-licensed under BSD).

BSD? On the kernel? Yeah Buddy sure... And I'm the one spreading missinformation. Read the fucking license and then you can come and tell me whatever you want. The licenses show the opposite but you keep reffusonh to belive the license terms you argue about

It is exactly what happens in distributions. Just because a distribution ships GNU Glibc (GPL-3-or-later) and Linux (GPL-2-only), it does not make the distribution itself a derived work of both.

Because they kernel has the sys-call exception to allow this kind of licensing. It's on the damn license.

[-]

FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

(except small parts of the kernel, which are double-licensed under BSD).

BSD? On the kernel? Yeah Buddy sure... And I'm the one spreading missinformation. Read the fucking license and then you can come and tell me whatever you want. The licenses show the opposite but you keep reffusonh to belive the license terms you argue about

Ehm...

Aside from that, individual files can be provided under a dual license, e.g. one of the compatible GPL variants and alternatively under a permissive license like BSD, MIT etc.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/license-rules.html

Just grep BSD on the kernel source, and you will find quite a log of those:

...
arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom/sm8650-hdk.dts:// SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
drivers/i3c/master/mipi-i3c-hci/dat_v1.c:// SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
drivers/i3c/master/mipi-i3c-hci/dct.h:/* SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause */
arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom/sm8650-mtp.dts:// SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
drivers/i3c/master/mipi-i3c-hci/dct_v1.c:// SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
...

Because they kernel has the sys-call exception to allow this kind of licensing. It's on the damn license.

I feel like you are mixing together a bunch of different, possibly related, topics in a very confusing way, and on top of that you are oversimplifying a lot of things. Not to mention the swearing. Discussing like this is not particularly interesting.

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Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

It says SPDX. The SPDX license identifiers are included on the softwares that over the kernel

https://docs.kernel.org/process/license-rules.html

https://spdx.org/licenses/

What you show are just examples of these SPDX that are included on every software interacting with the kernel's UAPI. Which is the whole reason for the sys-call exception.

They exists so thing like FreeBSD core utils por Android core utils being able to legally interact with the Linux Kernel

[-]

FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

So you are not going to address this at all?

Aside from that, individual files can be provided under a dual license, e.g. one of the compatible GPL variants and alternatively under a permissive license like BSD, MIT etc.

https://docs.kernel.org/process/license-rules.html

Those files, part of the Linux kernel, are available under multiple licenses. GPL-2-only, BSD0, MIT...

You know, you can just say you are wrong. It is not the end of the world. It happens to everybody all the time.

Which is the whole reason for the sys-call exception.

Let me quote myself:

I feel like you are mixing together a bunch of different, possibly related, topics in a very confusing way

[-]

Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

Those files, part of the Linux kernel, are available under multiple licenses. GPL-2-only, BSD0, MIT...

Dual license means that you can use whatever license you want based on a specific context. It's explained there. On the kernel the files are under GPLv2, but on other softwares you can use them unde other license. Thats what It means

Lets make It clear. Legally you can relicense a software if the authors of that Code agree to. Whatever is copy left or not. Thats a right. Which means that as long as you don't Accept contribution. You can relicense It

Now, another example, if you post a closed source app, then you release a GPL version which is exactly the same. Is that legal? Yes. Can you keep updating the closed source version? Yes. Because they GPL is based on the propietary, not the other way. However contributions to the GPL can't be applies to the propietary unless the contributors agree to do so. The dual licensing follows the same rules.

The kernel is still fully open source. Just that the owner of a Code can legally change the license (there are some limitations, but still they same logic)

Let me quote myself

Bro I already quoted the GPL license to prove you wrong and read both the 3 and 2 versions. Now I'm explaining the legality of relicensing and how it's legal to relicense copyleft software under a specific context. And you are ignoring It to say that the kernel is under BSD license despite my fucking info says that every software must be GPLv2 or LGPL and just allows dual-licenses. Which, again, don't apply at the same time. As the kernel versions of the software must be using one allowed by the Linux foundation

So no. You are the one arguing about something you know nothing about

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

Dual license means that you can use whatever license you want based on a specific context.

And what was my initial quote...?

(except small parts of the kernel, which are double-licensed under BSD).

BSD? On the kernel? Yeah Buddy sure... And I'm the one spreading missinformation. Read the fucking license and then you can come and tell me whatever you want. The licenses show the opposite but you keep reffusonh to belive the license terms you argue about

Honestly, you keep changing subject, mixing unrelated topics, and writing in a very chaotic way. It is really difficult to follow the conversation.

And even more honestly, I am tired of swearing and insults.

I concede. You win the conversation.

Congratulations, I guess.

[-]

Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

And what was my initial quote...?

My bad, you got me there

Honestly, you keep changing subject, mixing unrelated topics, and writing in a very chaotic way. It is really difficult to follow the conversation.

We were arguing about GPL being able to be changed. Which you still didn't proved and I show you the 2 licenses terms and you didn't argue against that, you keep arguing about other minor things, like when you bring Up the BSD dual-licenses on the Linux kernel. How am I the one changing subject when I didn't bring Up that?

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Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

wlroots and smithay are MIT, as well as some compositors

I said the main ones

Are KDE and GNOME are the most popular desktops and they use their own compositors.

ooooor sometimes developers want their projects to be used in Any Way Desireable and make libraries MIT, which is also common

And they are free to do so, never said the opposite

I just said what companies do. Not what devs do

[-]

rqdn@reddit

First, the "userland is mostly permissive" point is cherry-picked. Much of the critical infrastructure is still copyleft; GNU Coreutils, GNU Bash, glibc, systemd. Permissive projects often thrive because they sit on top of copyleft foundations. You treat them as independent success stories when they’re actually part of a mixed-license ecosystem where GPL components already enforce openness where it matters most.

Second, "companies won't fork privately" is empirically false. Apple took BSD and went proprietary with huge chunks of it. Google uses Linux (GPL) but keeps large parts of Android userspace outside GPL influence. That's literally what permissive licences allow. GPL exists because "they probably won't do that" turned out to be false.

Third, "bad actors ignore GPL anyway" is a non-argument. By that logic, licences don't matter at all. In reality, GPL absolutely shapes behaviour for companies that care about legal risk, which is most of them. That's why enforcement by groups like the Free Software Foundation works.

Fourth, saying "who would even fork coreutils" misses the point, and underestimates how software is used in practice. Embedded systems vendors, enterprises, and governments keep internal forks of software utilities. The absence of visible forks is not the absence of *private* divergence. The value of GPL isn't that people *will* fork, it's that *if they do*, improvements won't disappear into silos.

And that leads to the main problem; "source code is available" is not the same as "improvements stay public". MIT allows you to take code, improve it, privatise and never give back. This compounds over time. Permissive licences optimise for flexibility, but GPL keeps the ecosystem from fragmenting and getting strip-mined.

Pretending those are the same trade-off with "it doesn't matter" is exactly the lack of nuance you're accusing others of.

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nightblackdragon@reddit

Apple took BSD and went proprietary with huge chunks of it

Most of the BSD code that Apple took is open source (Darwin operating system).

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rqdn@reddit

Yes, I want to add that not everything in macOS is part of Darwin. Large portions of macOS are closed source, including GUI frameworks (Cocoa, SwiftUI), many system apps and services, and partly drivers.

[-]

nightblackdragon@reddit

Yes, but those were never open source.

[-]

0lach@reddit

> Fourth, saying "who would even fork coreutils" misses the point, and underestimates how software is used in practice. Embedded systems vendors, enterprises, and governments keep internal forks of software utilities. The absence of visible forks is not the absence of *private* divergence. The value of GPL isn't that people *will* fork, it's that *if they do*, improvements won't disappear into silos.

Even if company forks coreutils, they are not obligated to publish their fork, you can only request the source code for their fork if you have binaries of said fork. They absolutely can fork and use the forked version on their servers without contributing anything back

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

Much of the critical infrastructure is still copyleft; GNU Coreutils, GNU Bash, glibc, systemd.

Toybox / BSD coreutils, Dash shell (or one of the countless other alternative shells), musl, OpenRC / Runit... Every single one of your examples has had a permissively-licensed alternative for decades.

And you are leaving out a lot of the critical infrastructure: X11/Wayland, Python, OpenSSL, Apache... all those are permissively licensed.

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rqdn@reddit

I think this is conflating the existence of alternatives with parity.

Yes, things like musl, Dash, or OpenRC exist, but they are niches. In practice most systems still rely on glibc, GNU Coreutils, and systemd.

Wayland, Python, or OpenSSL doesn’t contradict my point. The ecosystem is mixed, not mostly permissive.

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

I think this is conflating the existence of alternatives with parity.

Yes, things like musl, Dash, or OpenRC exist, but they are niches. In practice most systems still rely on glibc, GNU Coreutils, and systemd.

One could argue that most Linux systems relies on Bionic rather than glibc, which is permissive... Anyway, just because there exist mature components under copyleft licenses, it does not mean we need to strenuously fight younger projects released under permissive licenses.

Parity is also not a binary value. Sure, BSD coreutils do not support every single switch of GNU ones, but it does not mean they are not perfectly usable.

And parity goes in the other direction, too. Does any copyleft display server exist and have feature parity with X11 and Wayland? Nope.

Wayland, Python, or OpenSSL doesn’t contradict my point. The ecosystem is mixed, not mostly permissive.

I am not the person whom you originally quoted, but neither me or them said the ecosystem is mostly permissive. They said "A huge part of modern Linux userland is non-copyleft".

And it is. The ecosystem is neither mostly permissive or mostly copyleft, but it definitely has many components from both sides. Therefore the argument "MIT has no place in the ecosystem", which you see everywhere in this thread, just makes no sense.

MIT/BSD/Apache2 and other permissive licenses are entirely Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licenses, and they are absolutely not and have absolutely never been second-class citizens in the Linux ecosystem. Same with copyleft licenses, obviously.

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JustBadPlaya@reddit

First, the "userland is mostly permissive" point is cherry-picked

I will point out that I never said "mostly", just that there are many of those. And, sure, they thrive because they work on top of permissive foundations, but isn't that kinda besides the point? Because what I'm saying is that you don't see people blame curl for being curl licensed, or X11 being permissive, yet this attitude appears with regards to new projects, which is a fairly big double standard.

(also, linux userspace would be almost useless without these permissive projects, it goes both ways because that's how ecosystems actually function)

Second, "companies won't fork privately" is empirically false

You have completely ignored my point. There are projects where forking makes a lot of sense. As a fun extension of your exqmple, using parts of *BSD's network stacks is a well known practice among many companies making proprietary OSes after all. But this doesn't apply to all projects. In many many cases maintaining a fork is simply way more expensive and less useful than contributing upstream. Hell, I doubt Apple are actually using a fork of zsh instead of using the upstream even, because differences between apple-zsh and upstream-zsh would cause issues for users.

Google uses Linux (GPL) but keeps large parts of Android userspace outside GPL influence. That's literally what permissive licences allow.

Yet curiously most GPL'd (but not AGPL'd) software ends up being functionally as permissive. I'm not saying this doesn't matter conceptually, but for a lot of GPL software there are fairly trivial workarounds that allow for non-compliance. Silly example - technically speaking, ffmpeg's licensing does not apply if it's invoked via the CLI

Third, "bad actors ignore GPL anyway" is a non-argument

You are missing my point yet again, as this is still a jab at the fact that forking uutils is pointless, see above. The entire point isn't that bad actors will ignore GPL anyway (which there has been cases of btw, see OBS vs Tiktok and malicious compliance of the latter), but that there is no reason to fork without actively malicious intents

Embedded systems vendors, enterprises, and governments keep internal forks of software utilities

Internal tools are allowed to stay internal and not see upstream contributions if they do as per GPL, the source disclosure is only required if there are external consumers who invoke their right to it. Private divergence is not really preventable, though public divergence it some extent is

Permissive licences optimise for flexibility, but GPL keeps the ecosystem from fragmenting and getting strip-mined.

Not every project needs to prevent fragmentation. Not every project cares about fragmentation. A Rust reimplementation of POSIX coreutils technically contributes to fragmentation, except it is ideologically impossible to upstream as is, so fragmentation would happen regardless

I admit that I have my biases that might be the reason I'm missing some ideas of GPL, even though I license a lot of my software under GPL/AGPL. However, I do believe in what I'm saying (and I do not want my words grossly misinterpreted)

[-]

FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

Good lord people here are delusional about the licensing change.

More so because no licenses are changing. GNU coreutils were and are released under GPL-3. uutils were and are released under MIT.

This is just someone who develops a new software.

Hell, there was some idiotic outrage about sudo-rs being MIT-licensed because half of this subreddit never realised sudo itself was ISC already

This really show how all of this is just cargo cult (pun not intended).

I do hope someone comes up with something akin to Lisp Lesser GPL aka LGPL with static linking exceptions similar to the existing dynamic linking ones, as this would solve a lot of problems I have with GPL for libraries

MPL-2.0? CDDL-1.1?

They both are weak copyleft. They allow to mix files under MPL/CDDL with files under other licenses (including proprietary), but any changes to the former must carry the same license.

They are basically LGPL-x without the static/dynamic linking complication.

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JustBadPlaya@reddit

Huh, I never realised MPL was weak-copyleft, that's amazing to know (and makes me feel silly for missing a license I see relatively often). Might employ it in the future, thanks!

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Enthusedchameleon@reddit

I really like the MPL. Touch my code? Give back. Use my code (in a lib or w/e), feel free to do so.

Gets the positives of GPLv2 and the positives of MIT/BSD.

Just read a bit of the EUPL, it seems to also have the same intention - with much more legalese on its text, "guarantee" of being usable in accordance to national law in EU member states, but also apparently with a dependency on text of the "Directive 2009/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2009 on the legal protection of computer programs (Codified version) (Text with EEA relevance)", which is unfortunate, as that could mean some permitted case (I'll give libs as an example, however unlikely) might be altered in the future without any modification to the license itself:

The license protects X and doesn't require any obligations regarding Y. The directive declares that for legal purposes, libs are Y. In a future change to the directive, libs get changed from Y to X by definition. Now you can't use EUPL code in a lib without altering the license of the new software you developed.

I think this is very unlikely, and there have been many statements to the contrary intentions by members and counsel. (As in, they say their intention is to never have that be the case).

But it does have a benefit over the MPL in that "the Work" is not only the code/file as the MPL has it, but can include documentation, structure, various files, etc. And that does make sense to me.

As I said, I just gave a cursory read of the EUPL, so I might be misrepresenting it due to misunderstanding. So do your own research.

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syklemil@reddit

AFAIK the EUPL is also suitable as an LPGL-alike that's more permissive around static linking.

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Enthusedchameleon@reddit

Bro, my tin foil hat just went haywire into steel foil hat; I asked AI (first gpt5 then claude haiku 4.5 both on duck.ai) about static and dynamic linking in LGPL, MPL, MIT and EUPL. It literally told me the EUPL was basically more viral than even GPL v3. That if you linked, your code had to be made EUPL.

Which is all not only the opposite, but very EXPLICITLY described in even the wikipedia article (and of course in the source website).

Really weird.

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AWonderingWizard@reddit

Calling people delusional because they have strong opinions is a bit of an ad hominem. Regarding your points:

1.) This is a hypocrisy fallacy. Just because MIT licenses projects can be useful, doesn't mean you cannot prefer projects to be GPL. It's not idiotic (another ad hominem it seems). Some of these projects are not easily replaced (X11).

2.) You don't understand GPL if you think the only reason why someone wants GPL is to protect themselves from corporate forking, though I can provide many examples of this exact issue.

3.) GPL is portable too, just use the version of GPL the project you are learning from uses.

It does make a difference. Permissive is weak, and by licensing under it you allow corporations to make your own work non-free and reduce the freedoms of everyone else. Permissive software that is used to build nonfree software is just as good as being nonfree.

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JustBadPlaya@reddit

I guess the "delusional" part was a bit of me getting heated, I admit. As for the actual points

I stand by calling the outrage idiotic, because complaining about a project with basically-MIT being superseded by a project with literally-MIT is a sign of doing absolutely no research (and maybe only listening to Lunduke)
Protecting your project or your consumers from corporate forks and private fragmentation by enforcing rights to source code is the main goal of the GPL, is it not? But is there any real fragmentation protection involved in a project as replaceable as GNU coreutils, when there are already at least 4 sets of POSIX utils which would be much easier to get on par with GNU ones without a full rewrite? I'd be glad to hear your points if I get it wrong
GPL is only compatible with itself, not even versions of itself unless you specifically opt for GPLn-or-later. Virality is precisely what makes it non-portable. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, and so are weak-copyleft licenses like SDDL (and apparently MPL). Being forced to release your code under GPL is restrictive by design.
"Permissive software that is used to build nonfree software is just as good as being nonfree" is the most bizarre take I've ever seen. Hundreds of thousands of games are built on top of one of SDL (which went from LGPL to zlib with SDL2), Raylib, Löve, MonoGame, Godot. Most non-GCC language implementations are permissive, most software frameworks are permissive. Should we consider software built using clang and LLVM "as good as nonfree" then? I would stop myself from strawmanning this but you gave zero bounds on this statement, so I can only wonder where you'd put the line, really

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rg-atte@reddit

People aren't being delusional, they are arguing under false pretenses as a part of a brigading effort and conspiracy theories being mainly pushed by people like Bryan Lunduke.

They came up with "rust bad" due to woke/trans/whatever other lunacy first and then licensing is the latest "concern" used to justify the hate. That's why the concerns about "relicensing" are inconsistent and only towards projects they already dislike.

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

My take is that the GPL is important if whatever software doesn't have a real substitute like the linux kernel or user facing programs like blender.

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GigaHelio@reddit

Hooray for less copyleft code I guess.

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ThrowRAColdManWinter@reddit

Seriously, how does this take away copyleft code? That code is still out there, you can still use it. You can incorporate this code into new copyleft projects. This isn't zero sum.

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onechroma@reddit

Companies won’t be forced to “give back” or upstream. This means they will be able to just take the code and turn it proprietary without sharing their own improvements.

You will probably find in the future that a solution for a specific thing, or improvement or performance, suddenly gets locked behind a proprietary code.

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mrlinkwii@reddit

Companies won’t be forced to “give back” or upstream

they never where forced

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onechroma@reddit

If they were caught not complying with a GPL license, they would be sued. So they used to comply, more so if a company big enough and not in a “bad” jurisdiction for copyright/copyleft licenses enforcement like China, North Korea or Russia

[-]

mrlinkwii@reddit

If they were caught not complying with a GPL license, they would be sued.

no they wont? no where in the GPL it says the have to upstream changes

anyways even if they did most devs dont have the money to sue , and before you say FSF they do fuck all

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onechroma@reddit

Nope, you don’t have to code back upstream, but you must show what you did, so upstream can also take that improvement if they like.

Like Ubuntu can develop something on top of Debian, and even if Canonical decides not to help upstream, Debian can go and adopt it (except for closed source things like Ubuntu Snap Store back)

So if they don’t show the code they improved on top of the code they took, they could be sued. I can’t take RedHat code for RHEL and make a proprietary closed source OS tomorrow.

PS: IDK about France, I was saying things generally, every country will be different

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mrlinkwii@reddit

but you must show what you did, so upstream can also take that improvement if they like.

NO YOU DONT

[-]

onechroma@reddit

What the hell? Why are you talking about the medium of sharing now or right to charge for it?

It’s simple, if I build a solution and then you build an improvement over it, I will be able, no matter how or “the medium”, to see what you did, one way or another. It’s possible.

If you take my code and build a closed source improvement on top, I won’t be able ever to see how you did it, no matter how.

Again, it’s very very simple, in one model you have the ability to see, one way or another, no matter if even having to pay for “the medium” if not online accesible. In the other, you can’t, and you will be left guessing “how the hell did this guys implement this on top of my code”

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mrlinkwii@reddit

What the hell? Why are you talking about the medium of sharing now or right to charge for it?

you have never read the GPL have you ? the gpl allow you to charge for the means of sending the code to users ( sony ust to do it the ust to charge you like 10 USD for a dvd for all the code ) in a medium of your choice

ere’s no way in a GPL license for you to take my code, improve on it, and make it so I’m completely unable to see what you did.

their is , please go read the GPL , the GPL dosent comply you to release your changes to the world , it only complys you to release the code the users that use it and they have the right to share that code

their is no legal requirement to host it online in a public git repo

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onechroma@reddit

You don’t understand, I meant the “medium cost” is not part of this discussion, or shouldn’t be. It doesn’t make me impossible to get to your “new improved code”, just (maybe) costlier, that’s all

But with MIT, I won’t be able to get your code except stealing it, period.

GPL -> I can see how you improved my code and implement it I want or be inspired by it. No matter if it has a cost or not, it’s possible.

MIT -> You can leave me blind for all your improvements on top of my code, closed source, no matter how much I want it or even pay for it (ie, imagine asking Sony “please, can you show me your BSD-derived code?” Lol)

I read the GPL, but you’re not really reading my comments

[-]

mrlinkwii@reddit

GPL -> I can see how you improved my code and implement it I want or be inspired by it. No matter if it has a cost or not, it’s possible.

only if you are a user or know a user

[-]

onechroma@reddit

But again, for the x42 time, but it’s possible. If I develop “MyProject” and you develop on top of it “MyProject Improved”, I can take a peek at the minimum. I can.

With MIT, you could decide I can’t.

As simple as that, and what I have been saying to you for days now lol

[-]

mrlinkwii@reddit

If I develop “MyProject” and you develop on top of it “MyProject Improved”, I can take a peek at the minimum. I can.

no you cant by the definition of eh GPL unless your a user , or know a user ,. theirs nothing that compels the person who builds atop of yout programe to host it online

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onechroma@reddit

All your test, and again, long story short for the x55 time:

GPL -> I CAN READ DOWNSTREAM CODE, no matter how, if online or requesting you a CD or whatever. I then can be "inspired" by it or take your solutions for myself (you don't need to fork it upstream). Debian can see what Ubuntu does and integrate new things from it without Canonical collaboration, it has happened, because YOU HAVE THE ABILITY TO SEE.

MIT -> Downstream devs can close the code, and you CAN'T READ in that case no matter what. You can call Sony and tell them "I know you use BSD on the PS5, I'm a PS5 user and use your software, could you pretty please send me your code? I offer to pay for the cost of shipping it if neccesary", and they will laugh and say "no".

And GPL enables code to be practically infinitely 9forked downstream, therefore able to get improvements over improvements by different people. MIT Software can be "hijacked" by the entity that decides to take it and close it, so that code/application will be as good/adapted/efficient as that entity is capable of, because nobody else will be able to say "let me try improve this"

That's all. GPL >>>> MIT, except you're a corporation or very pro-capitalism and "freedom to take whatever your like and fuck others"

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mrlinkwii@reddit

I CAN READ DOWNSTREAM CODE, no matter how, if online or requesting you a CD or whatever, because everyone can at the qorst case, ask for access as user, just like a Debian dev can ask Ubuntu as user. I then can be "inspired" by it or take your solutions for myself (you don't need to fork it upstream). Debian can see what Ubuntu does and integrate new things from it without Canonical collaboration, it has happened, because YOU HAVE THE ABILITY TO SEE.

their is no GPL requirement to see downstream code in the GPL , their is no clause in the GPL that says to have to put shit online or to be posted publically , The GPL does not require public disclosure of code

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic

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onechroma@reddit

unless your a user you can request it within a time period otherwise theirs nothing to get in a medium of their choice

So you can, you have a way. That's the point, with MIT there's no way, even if you're a user, if the dev closes the code, but with GPL there's always a door, always.

And the "user" definition is broad enough to guarantee access, even if at a cost (maximum the costs derived of making the code available to you).

Let's imagine you develop Home Assistant GPL, and TP-LINK as corporation decides to take that and fork it into "TPLINK Home"

MIT -> They will close it, nobody will ever see that code again or their changes.

GPL -> Even the original Home Assistant dev from whom they took the code, can request it because he can be a user of their solution (GPL doesn't prohibit the upstream devs to be at the same time considered users of the downstream forks, therefore being elegible to request that code).

So again it's simple, GPL > MIT

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

Nope, you don’t have to code back upstream, but you must show what you did, so upstream can also take that improvement if they like.

No. Copyleft licenses only mandate sharing the code *down*stream.

If I take your copyleft code, modify it and ship a binary to a third person, I have no obligations to give you anything (and neither has the third person).

The difference is moot when a project is distributed to the public, but you never have to contribute back to upstream.

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onechroma@reddit

Yes, but as I was saying, I as upstream, can take your “downstream” and adopt it if I want to. You don’t have to give me back, I can take it just like you took from me.

That breaks potentially with MIT, as you can take from me, close it and leave me guessing how you were able to do this or that

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

Yes, but as I was saying, I as upstream, can take your “downstream” and adopt it if I want to.

No, you can do that only if the downstream is willing. It is not a closed loop.

Which is why copyleft licenses do not prevent proprietary internal forks.

The obligation is to give the source to whomever you gave the program. There is no obligation to give the program to anybody, though.

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

Companies won’t be forced to “give back” or upstream. This means they will be able to just take the code and turn it proprietary without sharing their own improvements.

This has always been a possibility with the BSD coreutils, or with Toybox, for a few decades. Why is it a huuuge issue only now, with uutils specifically? Why are you (or people, in general) not rioting about X11, Wayland, Python, OpenSSL, OpenRC, Mesa, OpenSSH, Apache, Nginx, Go, GHC, Latex... with the same energy you are rioting about Rust projects?

You will probably find in the future that a solution for a specific thing, or improvement or performance, suddenly gets locked behind a proprietary code.

Just do not use this proprietary code then. Nobody is forcing you, and the original uutils code will still be available.

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ThrowRAColdManWinter@reddit

That's a possibility but not a given. Furthermore, There are already several coreutils implementations that have permissive licenses. Between toybox and freebsd utils, companies that want to go proprietary will.

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ThrowRAColdManWinter@reddit

I think you meant to write "more open source code" or maybe "more gpl compatible code"?

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GigaHelio@reddit

Why not release it under the GPL?

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ThrowRAColdManWinter@reddit

That is a valid question, but i think a valid answer is (from the author's pov): "because we wanted to use mit".

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

Why not release it under the GPL?

Which GPL? GPL-2-only? GPL-3-or-later? GPL-2-or-later? GPL-3-only?

And MIT is compatible with every GPL-x. If it is so important for you, you can absolutely relicense a MIT project under GPL-x.

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AdventurousFly4909@reddit

I like how it being written in a memory safe language but I really hate the license change.

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gmes78@reddit

BSD has had BSD-licensed coreutils for decades. Why is it an issue now?

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rebbsitor@reddit

BSD have BSD-licensed coreutils is not a Linux issue.

That said, the GPL is one of the main reasons Linux is what it is today. There's a lot in Linux that companies would not release back to the community unless they were required to. Be thankful Linux and the GNU userland aren't permissively licensed.

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gmes78@reddit

BSD having BSD-licensed coreutils (user space) is not a Linux issue.

They run on Linux too. They affect Linux just as must as rust-coreutils does.

That said, the GPL is one of the main reasons Linux is what it is today.

That is because of the Linux kernel, which is not easily replaced, being GPL. Coreutils are easily replaced.

Be thankful Linux and the GNU user space aren't permissively licensed.

Most of the Linux desktop components are, though.

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rebbsitor@reddit

If they're not an issue, rust-coreutils isn't either.

No one's really tried to push the BSD userland onto Linux on a mainstream distro. Uutils (Rust coreutils) are intended to replace GNU Coreutils and Ubuntu is doing it. If someone were trying to push the BSD userland to replace GNU Coreutils it would get the same pushback.

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gmes78@reddit

Uutils (Rust coreutils) are intended to replace GNU Coreutils

uutils was a project created for fun. It was not meant to do anything.

Canonical wanting to use it for Ubuntu is up to them.

which will affect a lot of distros based on it

If they don't want it, they can just run 1 (one) apt command to replace the package. Even if you argue that Ubuntu will stop packaging the GNU coreutils, which they won't, it is trivial to package it, and you could just pull the package from Debian anyway.

If someone were trying to push the BSD userland to replace GNU Coreutils it would get the same pushback.

I guarantee you, it wouldn't. A huge part of the controversy is that uutils is written in Rust. If it used C, a lot fewer people would care.

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rebbsitor@reddit

A huge part of the controversy is that uutils is written in Rust. If it used C, way fewer people would care.

All of the pushback I've seen is because it's using the MIT license and seems to have no reason to exist other than to replace the GNU Coreutils.

If it were GPL-licensed it wouldn't matter. Read the top level responses to this post. Almost all of them take issue with the license.

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gmes78@reddit

All of the pushback I've seen is because it's using the MIT license and seems to have no reason to exist other than to replace the GNU Coreutils.

That's the thing people say they dislike. But they're being dishonest; otherwise, they'd also complain about all the other permissively licensed, and far more important Linux software.

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fenrir245@reddit

they'd also complain about all the other permissively licensed, but far more important Linux software.

As in? Which GPL-licensed Linux software got replaced by a permissive licensed one that didn't get pushback?

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gmes78@reddit

There isn't even any GPL replacement for X.org or Mesa. I don't see how "GPL replaced by permissive license" is worse than "no GPL option at all".

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fenrir245@reddit

The replacement for X.org would be the compositors themselves, like KWin or Mutter. Both examples are GPL.

If you want a drop-in replacement, Phoenix is under development, which is also GPL.

Anyway, that's not the claim you made. You claimed that people don't outrage about other permissively licensed software built to replace GPL equivalents, I would like an example of that.

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gmes78@reddit

I'm talking specifically about X.org as an X11 server implementation. Bringing up Wayland implementations is beside the point, and so is Phoenix, which is still in development, and I'm referring to how X.org has been the single widely-used X11 server for over two decades without anyone complaining about its license.

Anyway, that's not the claim you made. You claimed that people don't outrage about other permissively licensed software built to replace GPL equivalents, I would like an example of that.

Wrong. I only said "permissively licensed".

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fenrir245@reddit

I'm referring to how X.org has been the single widely-used X11 server for over two decades without anyone complaining about its license.

And how exactly would you know that given reddit wasn't even around for most of that time?

Either way, the context is about replacing a GPL component with a permissive licensed one, not just hating permissive licensed software in general. X11 implementations have been around for a long time, and the whole XFree86 situation happened literally because they tried to switch to a GPL-incompatible license.

Wrong. I only said "permissively licensed software".

Then you're going out of context, and I would like you to show who is claiming to just hate permissively licensed software in general. Especially when the comment you replied to literally states it.

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gmes78@reddit

I don't think you understood this comment thread at all.

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fenrir245@reddit

The comment you replied to:

All of the pushback I've seen is because it's using the MIT license and seems to have no reason to exist other than to replace the GNU Coreutils.

You:

But they're being dishonest and selective in their outrage

What did I miss?

[-]

gmes78@reddit

I don't know why you're fixated on "replacing GPL software with permissively licensed software". As I already said, there only being a permissive implementation of something is strictly worse than having both a GPL and a permissive implementation.

If someone is mad that the latter is happening, they should also be mad about the former happening.

And yet, they don't seem to be.

[-]

fenrir245@reddit

As I already said, there only being a permissive implementation of something is strictly worse than having both a GPL and a permissive implementation.

Not really? That's like saying Microsoft having their proprietary browser is strictly worse than Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" actions.

The permissive softwares in your examples were not created to replace GPL equivalents, so no, they won't warrant the same amount of outrage.

[-]

FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

And how exactly would you know that given reddit wasn't even around for most of that time?

It is really sad that you think Reddit invented online communities.

Forums, bulletin boards, usenet, guestbooks, LUGs, conferences...

[-]

fenrir245@reddit

The context is about the pushback seen on reddit, specifically on this post. How exactly do you think you can collect and extrapolate opinions on those communities with the one here?

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CORDIC77@reddit

To a certain extent, thatʼs true. When it comes to this topic, hardly anyone is ever completely honest.

Taking myself, as a C programmer, as an example: Does it bother me that Rust seems to be replacing C as the go-to language for developing such tools? Honestly, yes it does.

That being said, I do use several Rust-based command-line on a regular basis zoxide, rga, bandwhich, …). The point for me is: the tool has to bring something new to the table, I am not interested in simple reimplementations. (And, no, itʼs X but with full color support isnʼt an argument for me; I have --color=never just about everywhere, my terminal is black and white… as it should be ☺)

Personally, I would therefore still be against uutils even if this rewrite were to use C. Thatʼs because I consider the entire project pointless. Coreutils works, all its commands are thoroughly tested, and after so many years of development these classic Uɴɪx tools can be considered virtually error-free. (sudo, on the other hand, has had a number of security vulnerabilities over the years; there something like sudo-rs does make sense.)

And, yes, even though individual components have always been under a license like MIT (X11 for example), the GPL certainly is one of the major reasons I use Linux (and not, for example, FreeBSD).

As the above shows, itʼs not just about one thing, there are many perspectives to consider.

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

That being said, I do use several Rust-based command-line on a regular basis zoxide, rga, bandwhich, …). The point for me is: the tool has to bring something new to the table, I am not interested in simple reimplementations. (And, no, itʼs X but with full color support isnʼt an argument for me; I have --color=never just about everywhere, my terminal is black and white… as it should be ☺)

For you, full-color support is irrelevant. This is totally fine. For someone with imperfect sight, such as myself, full-color support can be a MASSIVE user experience improvement, even if it is the only one of an otherwise simple reimplementation.

Not everyone has the same requirements.

Personally, I would therefore still be against uutils even if this rewrite were to use C. Thatʼs because I consider the entire project pointless. Coreutils works, all its commands are thoroughly tested, and after so many years of development these classic Uɴɪx tools can be considered virtually error-free. (sudo, on the other hand, has had a number of security vulnerabilities over the years; there something like sudo-rs does make sense.)

Either coreutils are a finished product that reached perfection and will never need any kind of improvement or maintenance, or they are software which is continuously worked on.

In the former case, there can be no worry about a malicious actor making improvements without releasing the source. What could they improve? coreutils are already perfect.

In the latter case, new development is not pointless. Some people will contribute to original project (one of the original projects, because there have been multiple coreutils implementations for decades). Some people will start a new project with a different technology or governance, if they feel like it will be beneficial in the long term, or just if they would enjoy it. Both are fine, everyone can work on whatever they want, it is their time.

And if a distribution thinks that a particular implementation is more suitable than the others, either now or it has potential, they will bundle it.

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rg-atte@reddit

Have you heard of this thing called brigading online forums? (Lunduke and friends)

[-]

tav_stuff@reddit

Except uutils was literally intended to replace the GNU coreutils. I would know, I was studying in university in Delft with the maintainer of the project who said as much to me in person.9

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Indolent_Bard@reddit

Well, that makes sense, why NOT replace a central tool with a version that's easier to maintain and develop? Because memory safety objectively makes many things a lot easier to develop by skipping a majority of bugs (apparently memory unsafety is responsible for over 50 percent of bugs.)

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tav_stuff@reddit

Memory unsafety is the result of almost no bugs in the coreutils though. Yes memory safety is a big issue, and one that affects a lot of projects, but frankly if you're a good programmer you tend not to run into those kinds of issues, and the coreutils are not just programmed by good people, but most of them are very simply pieces of software that are hard to get wrong, combined with being well tested.

The uutils are also not really more maintainable. I am not familiar with the codebase today, but back when I was hanging out at the maintainers house playing some card games 2 years ago or so, the implementation of the 'yes' command (which btw, literally just prints a string in an infinite loop) was something like 200 lines of Rust code lmao

[-]

AugustusLego@reddit

the implementation of the 'yes' command (which btw, literally just prints a string in an infinite loop) was something like 200 lines of Rust code lmao

Half of these lines are just tests lol

And the gnu coreutils implementation of yes is 260 lines, and WAY less readable (none of these lines are tests)

[-]

Mordiken@reddit

Half of these lines are just tests lol

Tests implemented alongside the main code an not in a dedicated file?! Ewwww...

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Indolent_Bard@reddit

Totally saw that coming. Of course, one has to question why Ubuntu is interested in some brand of developers practice project if it isn't actually more maintainable or bug-free. They don't gain anything from it being permissively licensed.

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tav_stuff@reddit

Maybe the real question is why *only* Ubuntu is interested after *all this time*, while nobody else is? Even projects that seem like they would actually be into something like this, like Alpine seem to be more than happy to stick to Busybox

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syklemil@reddit

uutils was a project created for fun. It was not meant to do anything.

It's a somewhat funny echo of Torvalds' own announcement of the Linux kernel as a student project that won't be big like HURD. We'd think the Linux community would be used to people sometimes making stuff for their own purposes, and then going on to immense unforeseen adoption.

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blue_collie@reddit

This you? https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1sbw1pb/waterfox_to_integrate_brave_adblock_engine_with/oefm7k1/

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gmes78@reddit

I am not against the GPL. I license most of the code I write under the GPL.

One does not need to be against the GPL to point out the faulty reasoning in the arguments people keep repeating.

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blue_collie@reddit

I am not against the GPL.

Right, you're just afraid of it.

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gmes78@reddit

Please explain how. I've already said I actively use it in my projects.

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ShotgunShine7094@reddit

What does this even mean?

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blue_collie@reddit

Ask gmes, they're his words.

Do you need help following the link?

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ShotgunShine7094@reddit

No, I'm asking you. What do you think it means?

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blue_collie@reddit

What do you think it means?

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mrlinkwii@reddit

GPL is one of the main reasons Linux is what it is today

no its not , nmesa and other core linux tools arent GPL and i dont see people crying about them

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rebbsitor@reddit

I'm speaking about Linux, as in the Linux kernel, which is GPL 2.0 licensed.

I agree it would be better if more of the system was licensed under the GPL, however the issue here is a core part of the system that is GPL licensed is attempting to be replaced with a permissively licensed counterpart that doesn't provide the same protections.

As much as Stallman was made fun of for calling the system GNU+Linux, GNU makes up most of what makes it a functional UNIX-like system beyond the kernel.

[-]

Foxler2010@reddit

Well said

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dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit

Your argument ia non existent

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albertowtf@reddit

if its not an issue why changing the license at all?

People doing this rewrite saying is not a big deal but push the change at the same time

If it is not a big deal dont do it!

Thing is, it is a big deal. Ask why are they changing license and those are the exact reasons many people oppose it

(Nobody cares about bsd having bsd coreutils coz nobody uses those. We care about having gpl removed from some that actually gets used a lot)

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gmes78@reddit

if its not an issue why changing the license at all?

No one "changed" anything. They wrote their own software from scratch.

(Nobody cares about bsd having bsd coreutils coz nobody uses those. We care about having gpl removed from some that actually gets used a lot)

No one's taking GNU coreutils away.

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albertowtf@reddit

No one "changed" anything. They wrote their own software from scratch

This is not written in a random repository. Nobody would care if they do their own thing. They are rewritting this to change existing shipping code for another shipping code with new terms

They have rights to do this, but they are absolutely changing licenses. Ubuntu and these folks doing the rewritting

You can play dumb for as long as you want. But dont belittle ppl disliking this

No one's taking GNU coreutils away. It will remain GPL'd until the end of time

Strange thing to claim. This is called a straw man. Nobody here thinks gnu coreutils is changing license or that somebody is taking gnu coreutils away

You are either playing dumb on bad faith or you just not playing

People here care about defaults. The exact same thing people doing this "innocent" rewrite care about about

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mrlinkwii@reddit

This is not written in a random repository

yes it was uutils was a project created for fun from the devs like most other FOSS software , no one forced ubuntu, fedora etc to package it or to use it on their distro

They have rights to do this, but they are absolutely changing licenses.

they have changed 0 licenses they created an alternative to gnu utils which is allowed in the foss world , you are not forced to use rust coreutils , like the way your not forced to use systemd which was an alternative to init systems

Nobody here thinks gnu coreutils is changing license or that somebody is taking gnu coreutils away

i mean the way people go on about it youd think that

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leo-bulero@reddit

yes it was uutils was a project created for fun from the devs like most other FOSS software , no one forced ubuntu, fedora etc to package it or to use it on their distro

Prompts the question of why they're doing it, then.

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Indolent_Bard@reddit

Probably because they like that rust removes over 60% of bugs.

[-]

leo-bulero@reddit

What bugs are there in the coreutils?

[-]

Indolent_Bard@reddit

I wasn't implying that there are bugs in it, but in general a vast majority of it's come from that. Rust enforces best practices that could absolutely be done in C or any other language, but are often ignored for expediency.

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leo-bulero@reddit

I wasn't implying that there are bugs in it,

Which is why mu point is that the effort to change isn't motivated by the language or code of the rewrite itself.

[-]

Indolent_Bard@reddit

Actually, this was just some random developer practicing Rust. I don't think it even was affiliated with Ubuntu at first.

Are you seriously suggesting that there aren't any bugs in it? I mean, I couldn't begin to tell you if there are or not because I don't even know how to test for bugs in something like this. But I'm pretty sure it's impossible for there to be a piece of software with no bugs.

Now whether those bugs have anything to do with lacking memory safety, I could not tell you either.

Also, there were other permissive licensed alternatives they could have used instead of this one. The reality is that modern developers don't care about whether or not people have to contribute back and care more about whether or not it actually gets used.

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leo-bulero@reddit

If it were "a random developer practicing Rust" no one would care. People care that Ubuntu et al are ripping out decades-old battle-tested software to be replaced with feature-incomplete rewrites written, as you say, by "a random developer," that seem to offer no advantages -- except the glaring fact that they have different licenses.

But I'm pretty sure it's impossible for there to be a piece of software with no bugs.

int main() { return 2 + 4 }

There you go, bug-free C code.

As long as you the compiler, (standard) libraries, kernel, and hardware act consistently with the programmer's expectations, it's perfectly possible; it just becomes harder once software reaches a point of complexity where its architecture can't be held in anyone's head (the coreutils aren't anywhere close to this point). If those conditions aren't met, then no software, including Rust, is safe.

The reality is that modern developers don't care about whether or not people have to contribute back and care more about whether or not it actually gets used.

Again: the problem is not what random "modern developers" choose to use, but the direction that corporations are pushing the world of open software. The assumption you assume "modern developers" hold isn't even true; the entire reason Linux ever became as big as it did was because it was it was GPL'ed. We can see how the more ""permissively"" (read: restrictively) licensed BSDs are faring in comparison.

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Indolent_Bard@reddit

To what end does this particular utility being mit benefit corporations? It's not like there weren't other permissively licensed alternatives. Unless they're just using vrassas a Trojan horse here, but again, how does this particular utility being permissively licensed benefit them? I guess it means that they can patch stuff without sharing their patches, but if that's something that a utility like this actually needs to worry about? I wouldn't know because I'm not a developer.

[-]

mrlinkwii@reddit

because people can make any project they want

[-]

ukezi@reddit

It literally is a random repository. It's not less random by Ubuntu liking it. They are just implementing the same spec the core utils is. It's also not the first alternative implementation and not the first that is more permissive. Toybox is a BusyBox replacement that is licenced as 0BSD.

[-]

gmes78@reddit

uutils was started over a decade ago as a way for the author to learn Rust. It was never meant to be a way to dethrone the GPL in coreutils.

You can take issue with Canonical replacing software they ship, but to argue they're doing so to avoid the GPL is quite ridiculous, in my opinion. If they wanted to do that, they wouldn't've needed to wait for uutils to be a thing, they could've just taken the BSD counterpart and implemented GNU features on top of that.

More importantly, what is there to gain in removing the GPL from coreutils? If you're accusing Canonical of doing this for nefarious purposes, you should be able to reply to this question.

Nobody here thinks gnu coreutils is changing license or that somebody is taking gnu coreutils away

That's what your comment implied. If that's not the case, your argument doesn't make sense. If it's something that already works, and is used quite a lot, you can just continue using it.

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leo-bulero@reddit

Because there is nothing wrong with the GNU coreutils in the first place, so the only reason to replace them would seem to be that the rewrite has a different license.

[-]

gmes78@reddit

Because there is nothing wrong with the GNU coreutils in the first place,

It is ridiculous to state that there's no room for improvement in coreutils (or most other software, really). The uutils README clearly states they want to improve on coreutils on the following points:

Better error messages
Providing comprehensive internationalization support (UTF-8)
Improved performance
Extensions when relevant (example: --progress)

It also supports Windows, which coreutils does not.

Then there's the reduction of possible memory safety issues by writing the whole thing in Rust.

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

...and? do you know anything about those utils? Clearly you don't.

Eg, have you used non-gnu make? Why do you think we usually have both `make` and `gmake` at hand?

Your clear lack of experience in both BSD and Linux Land is why you keep spewing angry, stupid comments like this one.

And kids like you is why we ended up with the festering abomination that is systemd.

[-]

SweetBabyAlaska@reddit

its not a license change and things like Busybox have existed for a long time. The reality is that the GPL is failing in many ways and has extremely annoying side-effects for genuine people who want to learn, so people are using more simplistic licenses.

and on top of that we've had the biggest IP theft in modern history with LLM data scraping. That includes GPL code and people doing "LLM clean room" rewrites of software. The GPL needs to adapt to that landscape to have usefulness. the corporations have a massive advantage when it comes to manipulating the law.

idk why people would choose a GPL license when it is viral, prevents people from learning and using those libs when its not really being protected. I think that its far more important to develop a community around your software and to foster collaboration based on a shared vision of the project. like look at Godot.

[-]

vaynefox@reddit

I dont know why people want to be used as free labor by the companies that just want to take code instead of contribute back to the project. That's what permissive license is, it is a cancer to open source....

[-]

SweetBabyAlaska@reddit

My point is that the GPL fails to do that. I don't understand why that's so hard to grasp.

[-]

AWonderingWizard@reddit

It doesn't fail that. The licensing system itself is the problem. GPL just ensures your work doesn't directly contribute to entrapping someone. If a project that is GPL becomes a staple in a community, everyone benefits. Look at Linux, GCC, LibreOffice, VLC, Blender, Krita, etc. These tools being GPL means non-professionals have access to professional tools without the need for corporate resources to support their acquisition.

[-]

SweetBabyAlaska@reddit

Godot is MIT licensed and it is just as big in terms of community, code contributions, and financial contributions, as Blender or Krita.

[-]

AWonderingWizard@reddit

Yes, but Godot can be used to make proprietary software that does not have to supply source code. Tesla used Godot early on in their displays, and they were able to not disclose any changes they made, etc.

I personally believe all software should come with source code, otherwise you are at the mercy of those who have supplied it. I would not want code I made being used to do things like trap consumers into some captive environment- like Windows.

Read Stallman on GCC vs LLVM.

[-]

SweetBabyAlaska@reddit

How is it relevant? I read it but I feel like you are just being intellectually lazy here.

[-]

AWonderingWizard@reddit

Well I'm glad you feel that way but you've provided no reasons for why you feel that way. I have nothing to go off of for why you don't see what I am saying. You only replied to the very end of what was effectively two paragraphs.

I pointed out that it is our legal system that fails us generally speaking- MIT nor GPL protects us directly from LLM clean room rewrites. But GPL still provides more protections, and furthermore, it is still not even legally clear how LLM derived code will/should be treated as.

GPL doesn't prevent people from learning (what an outrageous claim), GPL doesn't prevent usage of libraries (that would be proprietary licenses), and GPL doesn't prevent communities or collaboration (Linux, etc my other examples). GPL doesn't even prevent commercial success- just look at Mindustry.

Furthermore, my source goes on to support that it is actually permissive licensing that causes harm to free software.

[-]

SweetBabyAlaska@reddit

Furthermore, my source goes on to support that it is actually permissive licensing that causes harm to free software.

I mean its literally been 12 years since then and there are no dominate non-free compilers, let alone any based on LLVM. GCC is still here and doing fine, as is LLVM, and many other permissive compilers with their own asm backends like Zig and Zig cc.

and he literally just predicts that LLVM will cause harm to GCC and GPL projects, he doesn't say "how" it will cause harm. So there is nothing to go off of unless you meant for Stallman to be an authority figure to reinforce your point.

I pointed out that it is our legal system that fails us generally speaking- MIT nor GPL protects us directly from LLM clean room rewrites.

that was my point. but an open-domain/permissive license does away with the extremely tedious aspects of some copy-left licenses.

GPL doesn't prevent people from learning (what an outrageous claim), GPL doesn't prevent usage of libraries (that would be proprietary licenses), and GPL doesn't prevent communities or collaboration (Linux, etc my other examples). GPL doesn't even prevent commercial success- just look at Mindustry.

it absolutely does prevent people from learning from that code, especially compared to something that is open-domain like STB single-header libs... unless you literally adopt the GPL. Which is often not possible or someone may not want to.

I never said it hurts community or whatever, I said that this is by far more important for a project than its license. Again, just look at Godot or Zig. People will choose to work for the collective good in many cases. I do, and its not because of the license.

and the entire static linking VS dynamic linking is profoundly counter productive to the GPL's goals. Just look at `espeak` and `espeak-ng` every major AI TTS system dynamically links espeak to do phonemization (an incredibly complex process btw) and they contribute nothing upstream and they don't use their funding to create a better phonemization library either. At most its just a minor annoyance to not be able to statically link the lib.

The GPL is genuinely not meeting its own goals in many ways. It is failing to do so as the times change.

[-]

vaynefox@reddit

And my point is that using permissive license exposes project to risk of vendor locking life improving features instead of it being down streamed to the the project....

[-]

rks_system@reddit

Yeah, I don't think you know what you're talking about

[-]

Other_Fly_4408@reddit

How does the GPL prevent people from learning?

[-]

wriggly0u@reddit

Why?

[-]

atomic1fire@reddit

BSD/MIT license pushes adoption of an opensource project but it doesn't necessarily mean that changes will be pushed upstream.

A company following GPL licenses will be required to release their source code.

Companies prefer BSD/MIT because it makes it easier to integrate proprietary code, but it does not guarantee that they'll collaborate with the developers upstream unless there's some financial benefit.

[-]

Ace-Whole@reddit

But is there any incentive for such actors?

Like i understand BSD was a complete thing which macos/console os got into existence.

What about this? Is there anything? Or are your point more philosophical and spirit of FOSS in nature.

[-]

atomic1fire@reddit

Primarily financial.

The first is that anyone who uses a BSD/MIT licensed project does not have to spend a bunch of time building their project in such a way that the open source project only interacts with the greater closed source project via exposed interfaces or command line flags.

The second is that a company could build an non-GPL project and get all the contributions they need, before spinning it off into a commercial project, and since all the code isn't GPL, the company is under no requirement to release the source code for their commercial changes.

[-]

darth_chewbacca@reddit

Primarily financial.

There is no financial intensive for a company to maintain their own fork of coreutils.

[-]

Unable-Ambassador-16@reddit

It has nothing to do with macOS

[-]

Ace-Whole@reddit

I was under the impression that macos is a derivative work of xnu and bsd.

[-]

Unable-Ambassador-16@reddit

No actuall you are right. Apple did take parts of BSD to privatise it

[-]

Ace-Whole@reddit

Then instead of being vague and mysterious can you tell me what i don't understand lol.

[-]

Unable-Ambassador-16@reddit

macOS is based on Darwin (Apples open source OS), which is based on the XNU kernel and BSD

[-]

Ace-Whole@reddit

It has nothing to do with macOS

Then what were you even trying to say if i was anyway not wrong lol

[-]

20dogs@reddit

Oh my life they admitted they were wrong already

[-]

Ace-Whole@reddit

That literally read like correcting me. Sorry not sorry for not understanding the connotation lol.

[-]

Unable-Ambassador-16@reddit

I thought you were wrong, but then I looked it up and it was actually me who was wrong

[-]

darth_chewbacca@reddit

BSD/MIT license pushes adoption of an opensource project but it doesn't necessarily mean that changes will be pushed upstream.

Companies prefer BSD/MIT because it makes it easier to integrate proprietary code

This isn't an issue for coreutils. There is very little a company can do to add "secret sauce" to core utils. In fact, any forks to add secret sauce will be worse than the main BSD/MIT licensed repository.

The way in which BSD/MIT licensed code protects the freedom of users is via the collaboration of many people moving faster and being better than what a proprietary company can do.

Any company that forks coreutils is at a disadvantage as they now have to maintain their fork and keep applying their patches on-top of an ever changing mainline repository. This costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and with coreutils specifically (again, there isn't much room for secret sauce here) any proprietary changes are not worth the effort to keep doing this.

Use the right tool for the job. Permissive license is better for projects like coreutils.

[-]

whiteskimask@reddit

I think it's time for adoption either way. I'd rather see the MIT license on things and we all run operating systems that run portable software than to continue being locked into our repsective ecosystems.

[-]

Isofruit@reddit

I might be missing something or misunderstanding. The way what you wrote reads to me as if the current coreutils, which are GPL, are not portable or locked into a specific ecosystem. I'm not sure how that applies in a way that doesn't also apply to the rust coreutils?

The rust coreutils being MIT is not going to lead to them being adopted by windows or macos.

[-]

whiteskimask@reddit

I won't go as far as this page

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/

But I think MIT is a lot more convenient for persons to adopt and maintain themselves.

[-]

Isofruit@reddit

I mean, that person has a whole bunch of opinions that make me very quickly disregard anything they write.

As for your point, I can see MIT software being more convenient to adopt - You can literally turn it into proprietary code overnight which is the entire problem with MIT. But how would this matter for e.g. the coreutils? They're already adopted by those that would (Linux) or the players that could swap to them won't because they have their own (Android, Windows, MacOS/iOS). You could make a case for the BSDs, but I'm not sure that's what you're thinking of.

[-]

whiteskimask@reddit

You would also have the freedom to insource the original code under the MIT license, would you not? Why not fork it yourself?

The MIT license allows for it to be more plug and play than GPL.

[-]

edparadox@reddit

That's not it at all though.

[-]

Glad-Weight1754@reddit

BSD/MIT gives absolute freedom to do anything you want. Some people like that.

[-]

Dou2bleDragon@reddit

While I also prefer copyleft licenses, I don't think the use of the MIT license is doing any harm here. Any company that needed a permissively licensed coreutils replacement already had Toybox (https://landley.net/toybox/) and the BSD utilities.

[-]

Christopher876@reddit

I hear about the GPL that supposed to prevent companies from not contributing but from working at a few, that really doesn’t matter.

You slap a shim in front of it and move on with your life. But also the vast majority of their software is not public facing so they don’t have to comply with anything.

[-]

AndreDaGiant@reddit

A company following GPL licenses will be required to release their source code

Only if they publish the resulting programs. You are free to change and use any GPL licensed software without publishing your changes. It is only when you distribute the software that you are required to publish the source code.

[-]

tristan957@reddit

To me, having access to source code of software that runs on my personal device is a huge win for personal computing rights. Without the GPL, there is no guarantee a vendor will share their changes.

[-]

zabby39103@reddit

Well, as a professional dev. I can't compile against GPL code or my code becomes GPL code.

It's every programmer's right to license their code how they wish, but I wouldn't be able to use it at my organization if it was GPL. Not everything can be GPL. Most widely used "compiled against" libraries are not GPL, but MIT, BSD, or Apache or something like that.

I'm not sure corporate sponsors would be as interested if they can't use it in their own organizations. Maybe you don't want that, and that's fine, but I'll tell ya that any smart organization wants to share their changes. It pushes the technical debt/maintenance burden onto the community and de-risks the product long-term. I wouldn't want to maintain a core-utils fork forever, that would be a complete waste of resources.

[-]

JuhaJGam3R@reddit

Yep, that's why we have LGPL. And there's instances where switching to BSD is openly a good idea. Coreutils are standalone programs, you won't be compiling against them, so it makes sense to use GPL for them. LGPL means modifications to the libraries are very GPL, but you can compile against it freely. Finally, some projects, especially library projects, should use a permissive license for adoption reasons. This is professed by the most adamant copyleft advocates, RMS himself advocated for BSD in ogg/vorbis because the alternative was the royalty-heavy MP3 becoming the de facto standard for all audio media.

[-]

zabby39103@reddit

Good points. It was late and I didn't realize it was GNU coreutils and not core utils some core Rust library.

[-]

matt95110@reddit

So many vendors don’t share their changes and nothing happens to them, so what else is new?

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

Nothing happens? That's news to me.

[-]

mrlinkwii@reddit

they do nothing , many a time a foss dev has been fucked over and their responce was put teh code of fsf servers and then we can protect it

[-]

0lach@reddit

FSF doesn't really enforce GPL

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

FSF doesn't really enforce GPL

That is objectively false, there's a team in the FSF that does nothing but GPL enforcement. Look at my link above.

[-]

0lach@reddit

Yes, there is such team, but they are not doing GPL enforcement, they are doing GPL enforcement on the code they (FSF) hold copyright to, and even for linux kernel - they hold very little copyright, as the kernel is mostly written by individual contributors and companies, not the FSF. They are also explicitly non-punitive, they only want violators to come back into compliace: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/compliance, which makes it hard to call such thing an "enforcement".

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

That is actually a very common misconception: you legally cannot enforce licensing for products you don't own.

[-]

0lach@reddit

I'm aware of that, I'm also aware that there is many projects under GPL license, where the license doesn't benefit anyone just because there is too little copyright holders, e.g Minio, ntopng. This only proves my point that FSF doesn't enforce GPL in general.

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

If "in general" means "everywhere in the world for any product licensed under the GPL for free and without the participation of the copyright holders" then you are correct, as that's impossible.

[-]

Traditional_Hat3506@reddit

Does it even matter nowdays? What stops them from pulling a https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 and claim they did a "clean room rewrites"? Certainly not the FSF or any government...

[-]

matt95110@reddit

So what happens?

[-]

SanityInAnarchy@reddit

Most vendors seem to at least share their changes to the GPL'd bits (like the kernel), and use non-GPL alternatives for everything else (like what Android does). The Rust coreutils aren't the first attempt to replace low-level system components like this.

[-]

0lach@reddit

At the same time... Would coreutils need this protection in the first place?

At the same time it might implement some FS routines in TOCTOU safe way, and one time I wanted to copy parts of coreutils implementation instead of rewriting them myself, especially because it won't be considered a clean room implementation if I just try to replicate coreutils code as is.

[-]

tav_stuff@reddit

MacOS added features to BSD coreutils without sharing their code

[-]

mina86ng@reddit

Busybox being GPL is basically why we have OpenWRT.

[-]

0lach@reddit

Busybox is much more than just coreutils, I don't think uutils plan to implement its own init system for example?

[-]

mina86ng@reddit

Perhaps, but the point is that a GPL code made it possible for the public to get their hands on a great network device software platform. Even if Busybox was just coreutils, the outcome would likely be the same.

[-]

6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

Wasn't that because of the Linux kernel?

[-]

mina86ng@reddit

No. Linux Foundation and Linus don’t care about GPL enforcement. The litigation was done through Busybox.

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

It comes down to this: what do you want for the future of Linux?

Is Linux with GNU (GNU/Linux) as an ecosystem important to you? Or are you ok with something more along the lines of Android?

We are seeing now what incorporating systemd as a monolithic project has done to our freedom. I know what i'm choosing.

[-]

0lach@reddit

> We are seeing now what incorporating systemd as a monolithic project has done to our freedom. I know what i'm choosing.

But systemd is not monolithic, and it is under LGPL license, what did it do to our freedom? I was so happy to get rid of my remaining systems that were running OpenRC in favor of systemd init

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

Your experience is extremely different to mine, so I doubt we'll agree on any of these points.

- I value traditional UNIX design concepts
- I mostly align with the FSF's perspective on freedoms in tech
- I am distrustful of large companies (particularly Microsoft) and push for the need to keep them at bay
- I value personal independence, freedom, right to repair and control over our devices
- I see systemd as a corporate attack on Linux

[-]

0lach@reddit

> I see systemd as a corporate attack on Linux

Why?
It is not like it was enforced by someone, most of the distribution maintainers switched to it just because it was better than distro-specific init scripts that have never handled all the corner-cases

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

Are you genuinely curious or just disagree with my stance?

[-]

0lach@reddit

Yes, I am curious why you consider it an attack. This was an attempt to make something better than sysv, and they have succeeded, nothing more

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

Enjoy your age verification, my friend. You chose it - not me :)

[-]

slylte@reddit

Redhat spent ages making systemd mainstream, now Poettering is cashing in with his security-focused Linux attestation company

[-]

0lach@reddit

And what exactly is wrong with that?

[-]

gmes78@reddit

Poettering bad /s

[-]

powerslave_fifth@reddit

That's weird since people that actually work on the kernel like Torvalds welcome corpo contributions immensely. Never heard of Torvalds ripping out systemd out of his fedora system as well. It's a software suite after all.

If corporations like AMD and Valve didn't put their money and time into Linux, Linux would be an unusable piece of shit for the average person. How many people are daily driving HURD lol? All good things need funding, most devs aren't activists like Stallman.

The alternative init systems also aren't on GPL, they're on the BSD licence LMAO.

Seriously I think the venn diagram

[-]

6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

I value traditional UNIX design concepts

The systemd project consists of many small tools, almost all of which you can replace with something else if you want to.

I mostly align with the FSF's perspective on freedoms in tech

...so you prefer the BSD licensed OpenRC over the AGPL systemd?

I am distrustful of large companies (particularly Microsoft) and advocate for the need to keep them at bay

You realize large corporations do most of the actual kernel development?

I value personal independence, freedom, right to repair and control over our devices

Not sure what this has to do with systemd.

I see systemd as a corporate attack on Linux

lmao

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

systemd's main license is LGPL.

[-]

6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

Errr, right, I had a brainfart.

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

As I've said, I doubted we were going to agree. Carry on, friend!

[-]

6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

We are seeing now what incorporating systemd as a monolithic project

Unlike the linux kernel, systemd isn't monolithic.

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

Wait...

Is the non-monolithic systemd with us in the room right now? Can I speak to it?

Oh, wait, are you saying it's not monolithic because it has internal plugins?

Let me laugh even harder.

[-]

0lach@reddit

> Oh, wait, are you saying it's not monolithic because it has internal plugins?

...Are the plugins in the room right now?
What are plugins? You can install most of the parts of systemd separately: udev/logind/systemd-init/resolved
The fact they are developed in a monorepo doesn't change a thing

[-]

FastHotEmu@reddit

I am really not interested in reviving the decade-old argument. You can read about it to your heart's content here https://nosystemd.org/

[-]

0lach@reddit

This isn't really an answer why not systemd

In the section "What is so bad about systemd" the site cites many random bug-reports... All of them were fixed, and the fixes benefitted everyone using systemd, which counters the point. With sysv most distributions develop their own stuff, which will break, and there wouldn't be large enough userbase to catch/fix the problem before you encounter it.

Every time I have encountered problems with daemonization/service security enforcement before all the solutions were "just add this stuff to your service file", which is a very bad solution, because it is not reusable, and the fact that the most software doesn't come with sysvinit scripts leads to duplicate effort, which is especially bad with how relatively small the linux userbase is

[-]

6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

They are a bunch of different binaries that each do their own thing and can all (except for journald) be replaced with something else.

You are just wrong. Grow up.

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

I don't think a non GPLed coreutils hurts that future. I do think a non GPLed kernel does.

[-]

zquzra@reddit

MIT license is very corporate friendly, it doesn't stand against value extraction and expropriation. It's a tame license.

GPL is about preservation of a reciprocal commons.

[-]

leo-bulero@reddit

memory safe language

The GNU coreutils do not have memory safety problems in the first place. They have been around decades and extensively tested; additionally their source code is relatively simple and easy to understand. The only qualitative reason to prefer the rewrite would seem to be the license.

[-]

edparadox@reddit

Exactly my thoughts.

[-]

Demented_CEO@reddit

GPL is like cancer, quite literally. Anything else, be it MIT/BSD/Apache/etc. is truly open source and better for everyone.

[-]

AWonderingWizard@reddit

MIT/BSD/Apache is just corpo trojan horse to get you to do free work for them.

[-]

rukiann@reddit

Fuck rust

[-]

gmes78@reddit

Grow up.

[-]

rukiann@reddit

Fuck rust again

[-]

gmes78@reddit

Even a child could come up with something better.

[-]

rukiann@reddit

no need. the point is made

[-]

pezezin@reddit

Good god you Rust haters are annoying.

All the previous attacks against Rust didn't work (the community, the compiler, the CoC, it being "woke", whatever), so now the current argument is the license. After this doesn't work either, what will be the next excuse?

[-]

nicman24@reddit

that i do not like cargo

[-]

pezezin@reddit

Why? Are you a programmer? Because I am, and I spent so many years of my life trying to get C and C++ code to link to random ass libraries, struggling with Makefiles, CMakeLists and the like, that I don't want to touch them ever again. Cargo is such a breeze of fresh air in comparison, it's one of the best features of Rust.

[-]

nicman24@reddit

I like for my distro to handle all that

[-]

pezezin@reddit

Assuming that every single library needed is provided by your distro and is packaged in a coherent way. There are LOTS of libraries that are not, and compiling them by hand is not fun.

[-]

nicman24@reddit

i do not use libraries that my distro does not provide both as a security screening mechanism and as a general sanity test

[-]

pezezin@reddit

Then you will be really limited. I used to work in robotics, then in photogrammetry, and now at a particle accelerator. Most of the software and libraries I had to use were so specific that they were NOT included in any distro.

[-]

nicman24@reddit

We are talking about personal projects here. If my simulation requires cufftw I ll just ship docker

[-]

pezezin@reddit

That's what we do nowadays for some stuff. But now you need to wrangle with the makefiles and dependencies inside of the Dockerfile, how is that any easier than Cargo?

^(Spoiler: it is not.)

[-]

-LeopardShark-@reddit

I’m a professional Rust developer.

The community is fine.
The compiler is slow as heck, and pushover‐licenced, but otherwise great.
I haven’t read the CoC but assume it’s fine.
‘Woke’ seems to be a term bigots use to describe anything non‐bigoted.

The licencing is the only thing that concerns me.*

* OK, I’m also not super keen on the duplicated effort and fragmentation of superfluous rewrites. But that’s minor.

[-]

pezezin@reddit

As other comments already explained, any modern Linux distro uses plenty of BSD/MIT/whatever software. Why it is only a problem when it is written in Rust?

[-]

-LeopardShark-@reddit

That already exists. The problem is not that ‘it’s written in Rust’; it’s that this increases the proportion of pushover‐licensed code.

[-]

pezezin@reddit

What the heck is a pushover license?

[-]

-LeopardShark-@reddit

A non‐copyleft free software licence.

[-]

pezezin@reddit

Oh, I see that it is a made up term created by Stallman, funny.

[-]

-LeopardShark-@reddit

Also,

Why it is only a problem when it is written in Rust?

What are you on about? I like Rust.

[-]

gmes78@reddit

OK, I’m also not super keen on the duplicated effort and fragmentation of superfluous rewrites. But that’s minor.

Consider that uutils was started for fun, as a way for the author to learn Rust, over a decade ago.

[-]

-LeopardShark-@reddit

Hence it’s minor.

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

Especially since you never saw as many licensing concerns about Xorg and Mesa which were much more load bearing and harder to replace than the coreutils are.

[-]

AWonderingWizard@reddit

That's a lie. Stallman has criticized Xorg for being a weak free license.

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

how is "as many" a lie?

[-]

AWonderingWizard@reddit

Because you are setting up a strawman to justify acting like the unhappiness around the licensing is not genuine. This is a rewrite of what was originally GPL software that is a staple in the Linux software ecosystem. It would be different if Xorg came about as a replacement to a GPL-licensed display manager that was the standard.

You further support your strawman depiction by using a hypocrisy fallacy argument, "See, you guys were perfectly happy using MIT software prior to this, so it must not be the real reason". Except that's not true, GPL advocates have to pick their battles. It's not a popular license, and GPL advocates can't afford to fork and maintain every single fucking piece of software. We don't have the manpower. The GNU coreutils ARE GPL originally, and Canonical moving to replace them with MIT licensed tools is a finger in the eye of the whole GNU philosophy. You and the too commenter's entire premise is a disingenuous strawman bulg to act like there aren't people who genuinely care about the GPL. That's why I call it a lie.

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

I don't think the unhappiness is genuine on this website!

[-]

AWonderingWizard@reddit

You have no evidence back up a claim of most. You just want to use a hasty generalization fallacy to be able to summarily dismiss the unhappiness around the change. I will not allow this valid complaint to go ignored because you think a couple of Lunduke losers represent the majority of individuals who hold this claim.

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

feel however you wanna feel about it.

[-]

pezezin@reddit

Right? I really wonder if they are bots, trolls, or they just parrot the latest dumb idea they read somewhere without a modicum of critical thinking.

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

It's probably more closer to the latter, but not completely. It has a certain combination of factors that make it catnip for a certain group of folks. It's written in rust, it's going to be used by default on ubuntu, and it has the licensing.

Then it combines with actual concerns about the GPL by people who really do care about Free Software, and people's feelings of the importance of coreutils.

[-]

pezezin@reddit

I guess you are right, but it seems that nowadays half the discussions are endless flamewars about Rust, systemd, or Wayland. Heck, you can also find a systemd argument in this very post. Honestly, it is becoming exhausting.

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

indeed it is very exhausting. I just wish they'd port systemd to rust personally.

[-]

pezezin@reddit

Systemd and Wayland ported to Rust, now that would be fun...

[-]

Business_Reindeer910@reddit

Anything using smithay is probably written in rust (not sure if they export C compatible declrations or not)

cribbed from the smithay page

Cosmic: Next generation Cosmic desktop environment Catacomb: A Wayland Mobile Compositor MagmaWM: A versatile and customizable Wayland Compositor Niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor Strata: A cutting-edge, robust and sleek Wayland compositor Pinnacle: A WIP Wayland compositor, inspired by AwesomeWM Sudbury: Compositor designed for ChromeOS wprs: Like xpra, but for Wayland, and written in Rust. Local Desktop: An Android app for running GUI Linux via PRoot and Wayland. Otto: A gesture-driven stacking compositor

I've at least heard of niri being relatively popular.

At least if one using redoxos, then your entire init is rust, but it wont' be systemd.

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rg-atte@reddit

These people can't learn, they heard it from Bryan Lundukes ragebait youtube vids, the same place they got their community, CoC, woke and trans arguments.

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_hlvnhlv@reddit

I'm sooooo tired of seeing nonsensical culture wars everywhere

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NatoBoram@reddit

It's incredibly bigoted of you to associate valid concerns with bigotry to deflect all criticism. LGBT+ people are not your shield against online arguments.

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pezezin@reddit

Incredibly bigoted? What the fuck are you talking about?

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NatoBoram@reddit

I'm talking about this.

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pezezin@reddit

I still fail to understand your argument...

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AWonderingWizard@reddit

Nice way to try to conflate the concern. How about you keep your red herring. The issue here IS the change from GPL, and you are dishonest interlocutor to try to say otherwise.

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BitterDragonfruit3@reddit

Are you illiterate? There is no change from GPL.

This project is a ground up reimplementation of the utils. And a significant amount of core projects of Linux are not GPL.

Xorg,Python,curl,Mesa,etc are all not copyleft.

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AWonderingWizard@reddit

Are you ignorant? The change is to MIT from what are historically standard GNU coreutils which are GPL. I never said they were stealing GPL code. Canonical wants to replace GNU coreutils with uutils. Which would be changing from a GPL licensed set of utils to an MIT set.

Do you understand now?

Red herring? Hypocrisy fallacy? Where the do you get Xorg, curl, etc in this conversation? Want to try to derail it? How about you actually state an argument instead of using some open ended statement to casually imply something and shift the goal posts when I try to address whatever you are trying to imply here.

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arthurno1@reddit

Ok, is it any faster than GNU core-utils? Which programs are faster? Any bug in GNU thst is solved with the Rust version?

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Unable-Ambassador-16@reddit

MIT and BSD is a cancer

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ThinDrum@reddit

Then you'd better avoid xorg, wayland, mesa, openSSL, openSSH, python, nginx, apache and many more.

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stanpascal@reddit

Tu quoque fallacy.

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ThinDrum@reddit

I haven't accused /u/Unable-Ambassador-16 of anything.

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stanpascal@reddit

You made a fallacious argument.

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ThinDrum@reddit

That's not a tu quoque fallacy.

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TheBigJizzle@reddit

Fuck that noise.

GPL in one part of why Linux is absolutely awesome, coreutils rewrite not using GPL is such a blunder. I can't care about the rust variant, it's license washing for no good reason. Anyone defending this don't understand what they are asking for.

Coreutls are older than me, rewriting software that had this long to rust in production and have it's bug ironed out is absolute irony to begin with. I could be convinced it's a good idea in the span of the next decades, but they are doing that with a worst license and no one wants to explain why.

They won't be running on any of my systems until they change the license, period.

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

GPL in one part of why Linux is absolutely awesome

"Linux" the kernel? Or "Linux" the ecosystem?

Because the ecosystem is full of fundamental components released under permissive licenses. Python, X11, Wayland...

They won't be running on any of my systems until they change the license, period.

Do it then.

MIT is compatible with copyleft licenses. Just relicense uutils under whatever GPL-x you like.

It is trivial, you will probably need a couple hours to grep the repository for the license and replace it.

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TheBigJizzle@reddit

Anyone defending this don't understand what they are asking for.

Nailed it. I don't have time to entertain why slapping GPL on my fork doesn't really change anything here. Copyleft is what made the kernel what it is today, gigantic corporations don't share back and that's the whole point.

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gmes78@reddit

GPL in one part of why Linux is absolutely awesome, coreutils rewrite not using GPL is such a blunder. I can't care about the rust variant, it's license washing for no good reason. Anyone defending this don't understand what they are asking for.

This rewrite changes absolutely nothing. If you wanted a GPL-less version of coreutils, you could just take it from BSD.

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Gugalcrom123@reddit

BSD has fewer features.

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gmes78@reddit

It would be easier to re-implement any features you want on top of the BSD software than to implement everything from scratch.

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Realistic_Account787@reddit

What is the problem with the GNU Coreutils?

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FastHotEmu@reddit

That they can't be easily controlled by the corporate machine side of Linux - Red Hat, Canonical, Oracle and friends.

Say what you will about RMS, but he really was decades ahead of us.

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Masztufa@reddit

The worst thing about stallman is that he was right

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Unable-Ambassador-16@reddit

The worst thing about Stallman was his opinions on paedophilia

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Indolent_Bard@reddit

Then he learned why he was wrong and recanted said opinion. Is that somehow not enough?

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Unable-Ambassador-16@reddit

I agree with you, hence the "was"

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Indolent_Bard@reddit

Ah, didn't catch that at first. Thank you.

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6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

Has any of this happened to the numerous already existing permissively licensed coreutils?

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FastHotEmu@reddit

Why do you think macOS included `bash` as default for years and not BSD's `sh` / `tcsh` until they changed to `zsh`? There's a large feature delta between GNU and BSD utils.

I don't see the need to give gifts to giant corporations. The lead of the rusty coreutils seems to disagree. There's been no discussion, though.

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6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

So they had no issues at all using copyleft software either? Why would they want to have permissively licenses software "gifted" to them then? It's not like using different coreutils would give them a competitive advantage.

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FastHotEmu@reddit

It's a long discussion, but it comes down to whether you prefer something like Android or something like traditional GNU/Linux.

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6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

I don't see how it would.

Being able to use a modified coreutils without upstreaming patches does not provide any benefit. It just adds tech debt because maintaining a set of patches over a moving upstream project is annoying to deal with.

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FastHotEmu@reddit

> Being able to use a modified coreutils without upstreaming patches does not provide any benefit.

That's a ridiculous assertion.

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-nico-@reddit

What competitive benefit could a router company (any company really) possibly get if they put resources into improving something like the ls command?

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monocasa@reddit

They shipped an ancient bash for years because they were unwilling to comply with GPL3.

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6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

That's specifically a GPLv3 issue, not a copyleft issue in general. There's a reason even people like Linus oppose the GPLv3.

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monocasa@reddit

They were also subject to one of the first GPL enforcement suits, needing to be legally threatened in the NeXT days in order to release their ObjC patches to GCC.

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TemporarySun314@reddit

I doubt that companies will be able to monetize dd, or chmod...

And for these utilities there exist already bsd alternatives, that are under a permissive license.

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FastHotEmu@reddit

I'm fully familiar with both. It's not about monetisation, it's about sharing back the changes that companies make.

Why do you think macOS included `bash` as default for years and not BSD's `sh` / `tcsh` until they changed to `zsh`? There's a large feature delta between GNU and BSD utils.

I don't see the need to give gifts to giant corporations. The lead of the rusty coreutils seems to disagree. There's been no discussion, though.

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Top-Rub-4670@reddit

You talk a lot about how this is all about corporations not wanting to share back the changes they make but...

Has Apple made any change to the zsh that they ship?

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FastHotEmu@reddit

Apple has made a lot of changes to the binaries they include in the OS. When they are covered by GPL, they share the changes they make.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/506909/does-apple-modify-the-gnu-and-bsd-tools-that-comes-with-macos

Ask Jeeves, there's a lot of information out there on this stuff.

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Gozenka@reddit

There's no problem, and there is no meaningful performance gain, there is performance loss in some cases too.

Any Rust rewrite project in open-source is about changing the license.

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6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

Any Rust rewrite project in open-source is about changing the license.

What's the difference then between rust-coreutils and all the other permissively licensed coreutils that already exist?

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Gozenka@reddit

I would say the marketing (hype), compatibility, and the actual intent on adoption.

Which are the alternatives that you would compare to? Are any of those realistically being considered for mass adoption?

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6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit

I just think the statement "Any Rust rewrite project in open-source is about changing the license." is silly when anyone wanting a permissively licensed coreutils can already choose from several. And expanding those with the desired features would take much less effort than creating a new codebase from scratch.

Memory safety is an actual advantage, and I'm tired of people pretending that it's not. The majority of CVEs in the Linux kernel are due to memory safety bugs that would not have existed in Rust. GNU coreutils has less bugs in general, but having a memory safe version with better utf-8 support is still nice.

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Gozenka@reddit

Alright, that's another point that may be discussed within its context.

But you did not answer my reply to the point you raised. Which are the "already existing" alternatives that you think would be equivalent, even a better a replacement? I am not sure if there are any such projects; because there never was a need for one.

Memory Safety is a nice programming concept, but it is not what it is made out to be after implementation, and it is definitely not "Rust > C".

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rg-atte@reddit

Memory Safety is a nice programming concept, but it is not what it is made out to be after implementation, and it is definitely not "Rust > C".

lol

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Sweaty_Nectarine_585@reddit

why do you feel the need to provide an answer when you obviously lack knowledge in the matter?

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LigPaten@reddit

Are you all smoking the tin foil at this rate?

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mrlinkwii@reddit

old , security holes etc

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baronas15@reddit

It's not in rust. Everything needs to be in rust

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ThinDrum@reddit

That's true. The next Ubuntu release will be code-named Rusty Rewrite.

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Realistic_Account787@reddit

Rust is everywhere. It is disgusting. I had to call someone to paint my fence twice this year.

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SeeMonkeyDoMonkey@reddit

Although it is a venerable codebase, that doesn't mean development has finished.

As requirements change, the code continues to be developed, which risks introduction of new bugs.

Rust's strong typing and memory safety features are expected to reduce the incidence and severity of bugs as development continues over the long-term.

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mrtruthiness@reddit

What is the problem with the GNU Coreutils?

It's not memory safe.

And ... It's old boomer neck-beard code. ;)

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gmes78@reddit

rust-coreutils wasn't developed to fix any problem with the GNU coreutils, it was developed for fun, as a side project.

Things changed quite a bit since then, with Canonical being interested in using it for Ubuntu, but that's a separate thing.

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Turtvaiz@reddit

Memory safety is always the obvious answer

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jkubic@reddit

Not enough bugs in GNU Coreutils, rewrite keeps it more exciting to use your computer 🌶️

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FastHotEmu@reddit

Note that these are performance gains against their earlier implementation, not against GNU coreutils.

There's been no public discussion as to whether the MIT license is a good idea for these alternative coreutils. All they are saying is (from here):

Why the MIT License?

For consistency purposes. We're not interested in a license debate and will continue to use the MIT license, as we did with Coreutils.

I mean, it's a nice gift to the corporations that will no longer have to share back their changes... although honestly they already could do that with the BSD's utils.

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Unable-Ambassador-16@reddit

The fact that they are not willing to have a discussion about the licensing for COREUTILS is a red flag to me

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FryBoyter@reddit

Why? What benefit would such a discussion serve? Those who disagree with the MIT license won’t change their minds. Just as Torvalds wouldn’t change his mind about using GPL 3 for the kernel.

And ultimately, only the developers of a project have the right to make decisions. Whether it concerns the code, the direction the development is taking, or the distribution being used.

Of course, users also have the right to express their opinions and choose not to use the project in question. But they do not have the right to demand that the developers discuss this with them.

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FastHotEmu@reddit

Wow, I can't believe you are advocating for no discussion. This is Reddit in 2026 for you lol

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acdcfanbill@reddit

although honestly they already could do that with the BSDs' utils.

And if they all they did was write their own coreutils and let them exist, or use them in their private projects no one would care that much. It's the fact it's supplanting GPL licenesed packages in major distros that's making people nervous.

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

i really do not think we have to worry about tthe big changes companies to coreutils and don't give back, since the focus of the project is specifically to match coreutils. The best it can do is match coreutils under current guidelines.

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FastHotEmu@reddit

There's a lot of information on why FSF/GNU/etc - I don't think I need to repeat their points.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

and yet almost all those open source licenses are counted as Free Software!

They clearly don't have as big of problem with them as you do.

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AWonderingWizard@reddit

That's not true. Stallman has talked extensively on why you shouldn't use weak free licenses. They only classify many of those licenses because they are technically free by their definition. Permissive licenses are free as long as you receive them that way and nothing prevents someone from making them nonfree down the road.

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

That's not true. Stallman has talked extensively on why you shouldn't use weak free licenses. They only classify many of those licenses because they are technically free by their definition. Permissive licenses are free as long as you receive them that way and nothing prevents someone from making them nonfree down the road.

We had this conversation already some time ago. Repeating a lie does not make it true.

If I distribute a project under MIT, nobody, *ever*\, can take it away. At worst, someone could make a derivative work and keep that derivative work proprietary, but the original code will always be available.

The FSF classifies permissive licenses as Free Software licenses because they respect all 4 essential freedoms. It is not a technicality, it is exactly the point of Free Software.

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AWonderingWizard@reddit

You're the one repeating the lie.

If you distribute a nonfree program with software that was released permissively and you do not give the source code to anything in your ecosystem, then you have made that copy of the software I have received nonfree. It is you who does not understand.

The FSF classifies it as free based on you receiving it as free. If you do not receive it as free, then it is not free. I have given you examples in the past, such as X11 and LLVM being part of nonfree software meaning they themselves in those cersion are nonfree and they contribute to the proliferation of nonfree software. It is why Stallman calls them weak free licenses, and recommends AGAINST using them.

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FriendlyProblem1234@reddit

If you distribute a nonfree program with software that was released permissively and you do not give the source code to anything in your ecosystem, then you have made that copy of the software I have received nonfree. It is you who does not understand.

Nope.

If I distribute a nonfree program, it is irrelevant if it is a derivative work of a permissively-licensed program, or if I wrote it from scratch. It is not the permissively-licensed program, it is a derivative work of it.

And still, the permissively-licensed program is entirely unaffected by me releasing this nonfree program.

X11 and LLVM being part of nonfree software meaning they themselves in those cersion are nonfree

Nah, they are not X11 and LLVM. They are derivative product of X11 and LLVM.

X11 and LLVM are still available for you under a FOSS license, regardless of how many nonfree derivative product are created from them.

they contribute to the proliferation of nonfree software

This has nothing to do with the fact that X11 and LLVM are free software.

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FastHotEmu@reddit

Hey that's great! What about the GPL made you get into Linux?

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

Sorry , i hit save too soon. Please refresh and reread. I didn't realize it until after the fact (otherwise i would have added an EDIT line)

I like a world where people share software as the commons. It also meant that systems like openwrt were forced open due to relying on the Linux kernel. I was a pretty big GPL zealot at the time.

My stance has changed a bit since then. Now I care mostly about the GPL for projects that have no real substitutes (in an economic sense). This is especially true when it comes the the linux kernel, or any user facing application that keeps entire fields of endevour open (like Blender). I care less about the GPL when it comes to things like coreutils, since those aren't really load bearing on the system.

Also, the GPL has a big flaw when certain CLAs (Contributor License Agreements) are involved. If you sign a CLA for a GPL licensed project, they get to do whatever they want with code you contributed under the terms of the GPL while you're stuck complying with the GPL. I'd much rather sign a CLA for a permissively licensed project, since at least we get the same rights to the code.

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FastHotEmu@reddit

Thank you for sharing!

I respect your opinion but disagree on some finer points - probably because I've been shaped by UNIX as a young guy during the 80s and 90s.

I also nowadays volunteer for the FSF so there's that :)

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

when "unix" was made available, we ended up with BSD.

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FastHotEmu@reddit

https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

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Top-Rub-4670@reddit

Or maybe they're genuinely not interested in debating their choice of license, no matter how hard you want them to debate you?

Not everything is insidious and motivated by corporate overlords.

Those are coreutils, what kind of improvements do you think corporations are making to them and not sharing back?

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FastHotEmu@reddit

Some of the modifications Apple has done

For the file commands:

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds

As a small example, you can find their modifications of ls here:

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds/blob/main/ls/ls.c

Look for the conditional defines based on __APPLE__

In case you are bored, here is way, way more:

https://github.com/apple-opensource-mirror?q=&type=all&language=&sort=

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/506909/does-apple-modify-the-gnu-and-bsd-tools-that-comes-with-macos?noredirect=1

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Business_Reindeer910@reddit

which are the modifications they aren't giving back?

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FastHotEmu@reddit

Moving the goalposts, nice!

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TomB1952@reddit

My issue with uutils is the need to pull out all the stops for performance, to match GNU utils. I don't want thread pools dispatched across multiple cores for wc. wc was intended to be a lightweight micro utility. My cores are maxed out about 50% of the time.

This is a religious battle I want no part of. I could care less about Rust vs C. As best I can tell, a small group of Rust jihadists have declared Rust superior to C and they are willing to spend any amount of my system resource to prove it. It's clear Rust is not as good as C but it's an interesting language that could one day be as good or perhaps even better. Even AI will declare Rust faster than C and then choke on the task of finding a single example proving this claim.

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Ambitious-Call-7565@reddit

peak of microslopware

what a era to live in, retards have won

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icehuck@reddit

Just a reminder, this isn't about rewriting it in rust. It's about changing the license and getting rid of the GPL. There are shenanigans afoot.

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gmes78@reddit

Nonsense. If you wanted a GPL-less coreutils, you already had plenty of implementations available.

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Gugalcrom123@reddit

Yes, but not GNU-compatible.

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gmes78@reddit

It would be easier to re-implement any features you want on top of the BSD software than to implement everything from scratch.

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NotQuiteLoona@reddit

Then it would be easier to simply finalize those utils, rather than spending money on doing something from ground up

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Saxasaurus@reddit

They were really playing the long con when they starting working on uutils 13 years ago as a way to learn Rust.

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Green0Photon@reddit

Clearly there needs to be a coreutils rewrite in Rust that's GPL based that needs to outcompete the MIT one /hj

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Flash_Kat25@reddit

Directly in my browser? It would be so cool to have coreutils on my local machine but I guess everything has to be a web app these days.

/s

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