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> An important feature of GNU coreutils is, somewhat sadly, not reproduced by this re-implementation: the copyleft license of the original implementation. This
by est31 4y ago
> An important feature of GNU coreutils is, somewhat sadly, not reproduced by this re-implementation: the copyleft license of the original implementation. This takes out some freedom of the users.
Copyleft is very nice but I think the competition that liberally licensed software means to proprietary alternatives is way higher than the competition that liberally licensed software means to copylefted software. Meaning, if there is GNU coreutils around but no liberally licensed alternative, there will be a market for alternatives that proprietary vendors can use. Thus, somewhere out there will maintain a proprietary coreutils library and charge money for it. This code base will always exist as a risk to the GPL licensed coreutils package. If there is a free (as in money) alternative however, the proprietary vendor will have a much harder time to convince some company to buy their product.
I think copyleft shines the most when there is a lot of competition with proprietary solutions. Without copyleft, the competing solutions could just incorporate improvements of some package into their own. With copyleft, the copylefted software package has a chance to fight. But in a domain where Free Software has won, and I would consider coreutils to be such an environment, one can also have open source software.
- mik1998 4y agoIt makes no sense to make a dichotomy between permissively licensed software and proprietary software when any MIT-licensed software can be trivially repurposed as proprietary software, which is in fact standard practice in many fields (i.e. web, anti-personal computers).
- est31 4y agoYou can also repurpose MIT licensed software as GPL licensed.
- phkahler 4y ago>> Meaning, if there is GNU coreutils around but no liberally licensed alternative, there will be a market for alternatives that proprietary vendors can use. Thus, somewhere out there will maintain a proprietary coreutils library and charge money for it. And where is that?
- TylerE 4y agoBSD user land?
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoquoting Thus, somewhere out there will maintain a proprietary coreutils library and charge money for it BSD is not proprietary
- est31 4y agoI think people who deeply care about avoiding GPL use BSDs instead, so they swap out the entire OS (say some console vendor). As for coreutils, they aren't that important that one has to use them in particular. There are plenty of devices using Busybox, which uses GPL as well but one that is less offensive to many companies. I'm not sure what Android is doing, it might not have executables by default? Coreutils might not be important enough for people to pay for its maintenance, as is seen by people leaving the proprietary unixes. Idk. That sentence was mostly there to explain my more general argument.
- fomine3 4y agoToybox is a BSDL alternative to busybox