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Rust Coreutils Continues Working Toward 100% GNU Compatibility, Proving Trolls Wrong
98 comments
Phoronix, you are the trolls.
We like the Rust, we hate the cuck license. Simple.
So are you saying that the developers should abandon the project if they do not use a license that you like?
It's not about any of us enjoying the license*, it's about preserving the integrity of free software. It's both flattering and disturbing that core utils is popular enough that people have decided to give them away to anyone who would want to take them without ever contributing back. If those people are found out there will be no legal recourse. Those Rust rewrites would inevitably be made proprietary without any credit for the authors.
First GNU coreutils is going to remain GPL-licensed, so nothing that already exists is being given away; the only thing that is happening is that some people have decided to write brand new code. (And it is worth noting that GPL only says that if you share the binaries, you have to share the source code; if your changes are only used internally, you do not have to contribute them back, though you probably want to do so since it makes your life easier down the road when you want to use newer version of upstream.)
Second, what scenario exactly is it that you are worried about? I want a specific and plausible answer, not just vague allusions.
Finally, if the Rust authors are fine with the possibility that someone will use their code in this way, then who are we to tell them to stop their development when we can continue to use GNU coreutils?
You did not answer my question, and I think it is an important one so I will repeat it: should they abandon the project if they are unwilling to use your preferred license?
I wrote this before I realized that you don't actually care about the answer, you just want people to shut up about it, so sorry. If you want somebody to do the work you'll have to do it yourself now. You've been given plenty of examples in this thread already
Your ignorance is annoying.
It is telling that you cannot tell the difference between having a difference of opinion and ignorance.
You didn't state a differing opinion.
You asked a loaded question, insinuating something @somegeek@programming.dev didn't say.
It's not a loaded question; I genuinely want to know the answer to it.
And regardless, it is not a sign of "ignorance", as was claimed.
Replace a perfectly usable GPL software for MIT? Nope. I used to fall for that ten years ago. The social infrastructure of software is more important than the exact tech used. The license is fundamental to that.
I wasn't aware that coreutils was going somewhere.
The availability of a replacement with a permissive license allows businesses to use it without giving anything back to the community.
What this leads to in the long run is open source projects starved for resources, and businesses pouring their dev time only into their own business-specific forks, without sharing their code upstream.
Businesses can already create their own forks of GPL-licensed software and not contribute their changes to the upstream project; in fact, they do not even have to share their code with anyone at all if they use it internally do not distribute binaries. However, they are incentivized to share their changes, even if they do not have to, because if they do not then merging upstream changes will become increasingly difficult.
it still has a permissive license :(
You are very right. While non-copyleft licences makes sense for some software (a game engine like Godot, for example, released under the MIT licence) it's absolutely awful for the coreutils.
Lol, very first pair of comments. I love phoronix sometimes.
Ah, the duality of man...
Volta raging over any rust post, a classic XD
If they could just use a real licence and even more copyleft (at least something, like EUPL, MPL or GPLv2)
The licence would be significantly better. And would drive a bit more adoption.
It is trolling when it broke production level systems?
To be fair im NOT blaming the rust util team. I hope the best for them. But it was a bad decision to use something like that to power systems before it was fully tested and ready. It broke many different things in prod at work and we had to switch over to another distro entirely. Which was a lot of work. It made us stop using Ubuntu which is a shame.
Your first mistake was using Ubuntu on a production server. Canonical has made more than enough questionable decisions over the past decade that using Ubuntu for a production system should be a red flag.
It is trolling when it broke production level systems?
Depends. Were they the ones who put it into production level systems? If the answer to that question is no, then, well, you have your answer already.