1y ago

I think something sinister is happening with oxidizing all GNU projects (reddit crosspost)

www.reddit.com Reddit - Dive into anything

I posted this over /r/StallmanWasRight and I am not sure it would be taken well at /r/Rust so here we are.

I have been getting into Rust in the last year but the licensing ecosystem of Rust crates makes me perplexed.

Today I came along this project https://github.com/uutils/coreutils that is trying to rewrite GNU coreutils in Rust and it is likely over the years projects like this one will overshadow many of the legacy GNU projects.

They are almost all made on "permissive" licenses that will give so much more power to corporations, in fact I am absolutely sure all these (big) rewrites are sponsored by corporations to escape the GNU safeguards that were built to protect users and society.

Does anyone else see this or am I just too paranoid ?

EDIT: It is not my intention to single out any specific project/team. Instead, I aim to initiate a meaningful discussion regarding the licensing choice. Rust is likely the first language since C that holds the capability to effectively replace the decades old, legacy libraries.

You're viewing a single thread.

36 comments

I am absolutely sure all these (big) rewrites are sponsored by corporations to escape the GNU safeguards
Interesting idea, never thought of that and I don't think it is impossible.
But I don't see it, there are 400+ contributors and uutils group are students and someone working from home.
As I see it, we are finally getting new tools and all because we got new fancy fast and memory safe language. Community is growing, learning and making new apps.
One problem I have seen (thou I don't know about this project) is low code quality, but that's expected until we find best practices with rust.
But I never thought about licenses.
One thing I can imagine is even something like unconscious "self censorship", choosing more permissive license to attract more people and even corporations which will hire developers...
But I also understand that people want more permissive license than gnu.
Thank you for idea, I will keep an eye on it.
- One thing I can imagine is even something like unconscious “self censorship”, choosing more permissive license to attract more people and even corporations which will hire developers…
  This is the result of years of anti-copyleft propaganda which started to pay off. Now, all that corps need to do is wait for new projects and libraries to pop up and subtly (more than often openly) allocate resources to whichever project they need, or simply EEE. A much easier exercise than it was during the early years of copyleft where we could literally have a free alternate operating system to Microsoft, Apple and IBM while they were openly fighting it. Read on the Education and Government Incentives program for a reminder of what corporations are capable of.

36 comments