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License.md: Copyright (c) uutils developers Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software

License.md: Copyright (c) uutils developers Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: Yep. This project is definitely going to be embraced by the community in the long run, and definitely supplant GNU coreutils. The MIT and GPL ideologies are completely aligned.

oblio 3y ago
> MIT license ???
Affric 3y ago
Yep. GPL is the greatest thing that has ever happened to software and this stuff seeks to destroy it.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  As we all know, evil corporations have waited all this time for the opportunity to ship modified versions of specifically non-BSD coreutils without sources to end-users.
  - toyg 3y ago
    It's mostly that evil corporations have waited to get free work from the community on everything, and they're now getting it.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      I think a broad bias against copyleft has existed because people felt that it got in the way of just "getting things done" and felt that significant efforts contributed to BSD-style licenses would just "get rewarded" through patronage from the larger entities in silicon valley; leading to jobs, or donations, etc. I think that worked for many while the job market was pumping, VC was flowing, and the BigCorps were hiring and spending money like crazy. So people didn't feel particularly exploited. But I'm expecting the bias in the community will shift back to copyleft as the BigCorps show their true nature with the rounds of layoffs, mandatory RTO, cutbacks in perks, etc. Why spend a single moment of your time doing unpaid hours doing free work for these people? I've personally gone back to putting my (modest and used by nobody, to be fair) projects under GPLv3.
      - enriquto 3y ago
        > I've personally gone back to putting my (modest and used by nobody, to be fair) projects under GPLv3. Consider using the AGPL. Your users will be better protected by that. (If they use your software via third-party server, the middlemen cannot forbid your users to access and modify your source code.)
        sokoloff 3y ago
        If you think “your users” could include those middlemen, GPL might provide that subset of your users more useful/usable rights. There are reasons for all three of GPL, LGPL, and AGPL to exist. No one of them is best for all circumstances of software.
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        To me it's a balance of things. If I want to ever take external contributions, it's even harder with AGPL. So GPLv3 is sort of the compromise. The stuff I write isn't likely to be used by anybody who isn't "weird" and nerdy anyways so I don't fear theft from SaaS right now.
        NavinF 3y ago
        In practice AGPL is treated like a source-available license, not an open-source license. Most devs keep their distance from it
        LaGrange 3y ago
        Good.
        enriquto 3y ago
        What a world we live in, mate. What a world.
      - palata 3y ago
        Agreed. I don't really get why some employees push for permissive licenses. As an employee, my code belongs to my company, not to me. If I somehow have to depend on e.g. a GPLv2 project, then suddenly my code gets higher chances of getting public, which is better for me as an employee. Say my company allows me to open source my code, then copyleft is (again) better for me as an employee, because I force other companies (those who would use my code) to publish more of their code.
    - arghwhat 3y ago
      Licenses should be evaluated in context. 1. For anything internal, they already had free work from GPL. They can even modify it - the for them unfortunate side-effects only apply if they need to distribute it to outsiders, as only those receiving a copy need access to the source. 2. For anything external in this particular example, they can either use GPL projects unmodified (no effort required on their part in that case), or they could get all these bits from BSD with a BSD license already and do whatever they want. GPL - and more importantly, AGPL - is definitely important for full-fledged products that can be monetized and abused, with improvements never made available. Note that no common license require any degree of upstream collaboration. coreutils on the other hand isn't such a full product. This project hardly enables anything new - they could just use a BSD userspace or other portable coreutils clone - but if I end up exposed to some included coreutils in a proprietary product, I'd much rather have that they could easily include a proper one. The same logic applies to many other things too.
      - toyg 3y ago
        > GPL - and more importantly, AGPL - is definitely important for full-fledged products that can be monetized and abused With GPL3, that covers pretty much everything from laptops to online databases. Which is why Apple, for example, has worked very hard to rip any GPL code out of their systems. > This project hardly enables anything new - they could just use a BSD userspace or other portable coreutils clone Yes, but it is a competitive disadvantage to ship something less familiar. Again, the Apple example shows most developers would run to replace the shipped utilities with GNU versions instead, which was good for the ecosystem as a whole - less so for Apple, of course, which lost some control on target toolchains and suffered a competitive disadvantage towards Linux machines (minor, sure, but every little helps). It's sad that this particular project is headed by Mozilla people, who are supposed to care about the health of the opensource community as a whole, and still does the wrong thing - probably out of a (vaguely desperate) hunt for widespread adoption of Rust, at the expense of the overall free-software community.
        sylvestre 3y ago
        This project isn't related to Mozilla at all.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    Every time someone has said something to the effect of "it'll never happen" it happens, and then some. You need to understand how evil corporations work. They may be composed of perfectly reasonable people but, taken as a whole, they are literally psychopathic. It's not that they are "waiting" for something to be possible, it's just that at every step they will take anything and everything they can and give back as little as they possibly can. Have you ever been in such a corporation and tried to say you should release source code when you don't have to? You'd be laughed out of the room. Don't be fooled by companies like Microsoft taking part in "open source". They have simply calculated that right now it's advantageous for them to appear that way. But they are always taking the maximum and giving back the minimum, no matter what. We won't change this, but we can raise what that minimum is. That's why we have the GPL.
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    Clang on Mac is closed source. We're already swinging back away from being able to know what went into our binaries
ghusbands 3y ago
> Yep. This project is definitely going to be embraced by the community in the long run, and definitely supplant GNU coreutils. The ideologies are completely aligned. By tone, I assume this is sarcasm. Could you perhaps clearly state the issue?
- serf 3y ago
  here's an OK synopsis of why it's different, even if I don't necessarily agree with the 'style of language' [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383680
  - AlienRobot 3y ago
    Wouldn't GPL be perfectly fine with this if it was a library instead? I don't get it.
    - Deeg9rie9usi 3y ago
      People seem to hate GPL for no reason these days. As you said, since it is no library, GPL would be perfectly fine.
      - baq 3y ago
        They can’t use GPL software at their $DAYJOB most likely.
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Often can't contribute either. When I worked at Google, contributing to open source projects was permitted with the right paperwork etc. but there was extra caution around GPL licensed projects, esp V3. Which to me is more of a sign that the GPL actually works than anything else.
        anonymous_sorry 3y ago
PoignardAzur 3y ago
To be clear, the issue is that this code that people produced for free is too free and evil corporations might... what, profit from it more than they currently profit from coreutils' existence until eventually all software is locked and proprietary forever? Sarcasm aside, I don't see how the existence of this code or its hypothetical adoption would hurt anyone. Ideology isn't worth following for its own sake, there has to be a mapping to physical reality, and any mapping that interprets a rewrite of coreutils as bad because it's too permissive is extremely suspect to me. Like, what does the GPL infectiousness even protect here? Coreutils is decades old. Are we worried Microsoft is going to EEE it?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Maybe... AWS release a proprietary source-unavailable CoreUtils that they stick on their VMs. They embrace it! they extend it! And then eventually the average dev needs to use the AWSCoreUtils (source unavailable, restrictive license that you can't sue Bezos etc.) to get anything done as everyone else's bash script assumes it's functionality.
  - arccy 3y ago
    instead we have EEE by GNU coreutils on proper POSIX tools and we're forced to install the GNU toolset to make scripts work
    - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
      Please elaborate on the "extinguish" part from GNU/GPL. Edit: Doesnt the existence of uutils already contradict that?
      - Gabrys1 3y ago
        "forced to install the GNU toolset to make scripts work" is the extinguish part to my understanding
    - Gabrys1 3y ago
rcxdude 3y ago
I think at this point the vast majority of linux users are indifferent to the difference between copyleft and non-copyleft licenses (and of those that do care, they are likely to lean against copyleft). Whether this project actually has enough advantages (and small enough disadvantages: compatibility still seems to be far from complete enough) to be adopted by users or distributions is another matter, though.
- denotational 3y ago
  > and of those that do care, they are likely to lean against copyleft What is this based on? Asking in good faith.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    My impression that the vast majority of linux users who are thinking about code licensing are using it commercially and so copyleft represents an extra burden on them. (also, IMO, copyleft vs non-copyleft doesn't seem to make a huge difference to the outcomes copyleft advocates claim to care about, especially to the average user - most MIT licensed projects still generally receive contributions from people using them commercially, and some GPL projects (linux itself suffering from this greatly) still suffer from being fragmented by proprietary patches and forks, even if the license is being complied with.)
    - zelphirkalt 3y ago
      I would say copyleft licenses can even be better for a business, since they make sure, that competitors cannot grab and run, but need to contribute back. Businesses just need to understand, that copyleft also applies to the competition, when they use copyleft licensed projects.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Agreed, and as a friend pointed out to me years ago, there's nothing stopping people who author GPLd code from making it clear that if a corporation wants a different licensing arrangement for something that's under GPL, they're perfectly capable of negotiating that with the author and paying for it. That this doesn't happen often shows the motivation of most companies using open source is ultimately ... just looking for free work.
noirscape 3y ago
Your sarcasm aside, GNU doesn't hold the exclusive right to make the coreutils, nor the demand to put them under GPL. After all, they're just an implementation of the POSIX spec (which to be fair tries to implementation match) and non-GPL coreutil utilities do exist (Both OpenBSD and FreeBSD for example have their own set of coreutils that are well, BSD licensed.)
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  It isn't about that though. Of course GNU doesn't hold that right, who said they did?
  - noirscape 3y ago
    Even then I think the amount of people who care about MIT vs. GPL isn't large enough to be relevant. "Communities" (really, just distro maintainers, I don't think most people will install their own coreutils) aren't really that aligned to the GPL as the parent likes to imply they are (the only real license alignment usually is "no proprietary if we can help it", which makes GPL vs MIT equal and probably even leans slightly towards MIT because that permits more functional systems in restrictive environments.) A distro's choice will probably come down to feature completeness, safety down the line and ease of maintenance. In that regard, uutils is a much scarier thing for GPL adherents than the coreutils, which suffer from the classic GNU Project bloat problems as well as being written in C, neither of which will ever be fixed (due to structural GNU Project reasons as well as it just being a 3 decades old software project.)
- Diti 3y ago
  Where can one read the part of POSIX which describe Coreutils? I always thought those were just GNU tools.
  - noirscape 3y ago
    Just check the spec itself. It pretty much describes the expected commandline syntax and behavior for commands the coreutils provide[0]. GNU coreutils is on its own a superset of a part of the POSIX spec (they started as rewrites of several Unix utilities), which mostly means that they added a bunch of extra flags and options. The other half of this is GNU bash which includes the non-command parts of POSIX such as shell syntax. POSIX itself meanwhile is basically a reverse spec (very much like how the C standard isn't really a standard, it's just a collective set of rules all notable C compilers follow); it was made to unify all the various Unix offshoots that were being developed and define a common set of commandline utilities and rules that they all shared. (Nowadays, that's mostly the BSDs, Linux and MacOS. Windows is the only notable OS that doesn't really do anything with POSIX besides a few aliases.) [0]: See for example the POSIX reference for cp and you'll see it's pretty similar to the GNU cp manpage - https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/cp.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c...
pjmlp 3y ago
People like to shit on GPL, yet Linux and GCC would never had happened if it wasn't for it. FreeBSD has after all enjoyed lots of upstream collaboration from Sony and Apple. /s I don't care about what UNIX flavour I get to use, had it not been for Linux, most likely I would still enjoy Solaris anyway. Which is what would have happened if BSD wasn't tainted by the lawsuit.
- josephg 3y ago
  > People like to shit on GPL, yet Linux and GCC would never had happened if it wasn't for it. Why wouldn't it? FreeBSD seems alive and well, and its doing quite well for itself despite not having as many upstream corporate contributions. And why should freebsd care if Apple, Sony and Microsoft repurpose their software? If something I wrote ended up in macos and the PS5 I'd think that was pretty cool.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    You'd think it was pretty cool, sure, we all would... but imagine you lose your job, the job market sucks, etc. you're on your 8th month of unemployment and having a hard time making mortgage payments and you see a company like Sony shipping something based on your own open source stuff... but without contributing back, without attribution, and without compensation? Real world scenarios like this is what led people to embrace the GPL. When times are good, corporate use of open source trickles down to the community in the form of patronage and employment. It is not always the case that this happens during "bad times."
    - tzs 3y ago
      >> If something I wrote ended up in macos and the PS5 I'd think that was pretty cool. > You'd think it was pretty cool, sure, we all would... but imagine you lose your job, the job market sucks, etc. you're on your 8th month of unemployment and having a hard time making mortgage payments and you see a company like Sony shipping something based on your own open source stuff... but without contributing back, without attribution, and without compensation? ...whereas if you had used GPL you would still be unemployed in a lousy job market on your 8th month of unemployment and having a hard time making mortgage payments, but would have some Sony source code to look at and use.
lifthrasiir 3y ago
That happened already, if you haven't noticed yet. Android has used Toybox (0BSD) as its coreutils replacement for a decade. I don't see any reason to particularly criticize uutils for this exact reason at this point.
- lucideer 3y ago
  > embraced by the community > Android Yes Android is definitely representative of the community...
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    I've interpreted that as the user community, because your statement would be a tautology if it were the free software community instead.
    - lucideer 3y ago
      The "community" in this case would be one having input to selecting which version of coreutils any given distro may bundle. That's typically not users, even in more engaged linux distro projects. It's certainly not android users. And while any corporation is ultimately made up of individuals with presumably some limited autonomy in software dependency choices, it seems a bit of a stretch to refer to google employees as a "community" fitting into this context.
      - lifthrasiir 3y ago
        That's an extremely narrow definition of the community in my opinion. And even that doesn't adaquately consider the vast majority who do have but do not exercise that autonomy---Linux container users won't care if the container is based on GNU coreutils or Busybox or Toybox, they only care about the image footprint. (And this made Alpine Linux huge in the world of containers.) I believe that, even under your definition, it is only a small fraction of that community who explicitly want GNU coreutils. Not necessarily good thing, but just a sad reality.
globular-toast 3y ago
I'm so relieved to find the top comment here is about the licence. The trend towards MIT-style licences and away from the GPL is a worrying one. I don't understand the problem people have with the GPL. The GPL is there to ensure free software stays free forever. In a world with copyright this is the only way to do it. Permissive licences and public domain do not work. Companies like Microsoft hate the GPL. This alone should tell you that you, an individual enthusiast, should probably love it.
- tcmart14 3y ago
  It depends, like all things. I am fine with the GPL, but there are ways it hinders open source. A primary example, Linux can benefit from BSD and MIT licensed code, but it doesn't go the other way. FreeBSD can not benefit from GPL code. At least on the BSD side of things, that is why the GPL is disliked. As an example, FreeBSD developers can write a filesystem with the BSD license and Linux can sort yoink that code out of the code tree and use it (supposing nothing special needs to be done with interfaces and such). But the reverse isn't true. If Linux developers write a new FS in the linux kernel and throw a GPL on it, FreeBSD can't utilize that code.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    No, FreeBSD can very much benefit from GPL code. The choose not to use it.
david_draco 3y ago
Is it even legal to take a GPL-licensed code, translating to Rust ensuring it is exactly compatible, and then releasing under non-GPL? I thought you would need to extract a clean-room specification from it first, and ideally have separate people extracting the specification and writing the new code.
- krylon 3y ago
  You can use the man pages as your reference. Another comment also mentioned a test suite. I think using that to check how equivalent your attempt is does not violate the GPL.
- Y_Y 3y ago
  I had the same thought. This very much feels like a derived work. Since they (aim to) replicate the behaviour if the gnutils, and not just some generic posix utiles then I think it would be hard to argue the GPL doesn't apply in a legal sense. I think in a moral sense it very much is a violation, since the GNU authors presumably intended for their work to be built on only by further copyleft works.
devnullbrain 3y ago
>definitely supplant GNU coreutils If you're going to make facetious arguments, make them towards beliefs held by people who actually exist.
krylon 3y ago
The BSD projects' userlands have been used by other projects. If I want a Unix-like userland that is permissively licensed, I already have several to choose from. Is there any pressing need to be bug-for-bug compatible to the GNU counterpart? (Just to be clear, I am not opposed to this project, but I'm not sure how many people will rejoice and adopt this just because of the license. But I'll admit I am going on vibes here.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Drop in replacement with less license issues, reactionary types endlessly arguing the notion of freedom, code that just works, and lots of development activity. What is there not to like for the likes of Red Hat, Ubuntu, Google, Amazon and others providing Linux based products. In all seriousness, if you remove all non GPL licensed software from your Linux distribution because it's not pure enough, you'll be left with something that is a bit less comprehensive than your average operating system. It would miss things like a UI for example. Because both X Windows and Wayland are MIT licensed. A lot of popular server software that made Linux successful. And generally a lot of stuff that most of the OSS community uses and depend on every day. Like OpenSSH which is BSD licensed. Or things like Apache httpd (for which the Apache license was invented), etc. The GPL vision where all that stuff was going to be GPL licensed just never played out that way. Developers and companies decided otherwise. And this is fine. It's is not a problem that a lot of people believe needs fixing (as evidenced by a lot of non GPL OSS without good GPL alternatives). But of course if you feel otherwise, best of luck fixing that problem. The world runs on software. A lot of that is free and open source. And most of that is not licensed under the GPL.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
FWIW about this topic, gitoxide is another project which seems to be in the vein of "rewrite a fundamental C thing in Rust, and at the same time switch to a non-copyleft license" (in that case, Apache) An unfortunate trend.

oblio 3y ago

> MIT license ???

Affric 3y ago

Yep. GPL is the greatest thing that has ever happened to software and this stuff seeks to destroy it.

arghwhat 3y ago
As we all know, evil corporations have waited all this time for the opportunity to ship modified versions of specifically non-BSD coreutils without sources to end-users.
- toyg 3y ago
  It's mostly that evil corporations have waited to get free work from the community on everything, and they're now getting it.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I think a broad bias against copyleft has existed because people felt that it got in the way of just "getting things done" and felt that significant efforts contributed to BSD-style licenses would just "get rewarded" through patronage from the larger entities in silicon valley; leading to jobs, or donations, etc. I think that worked for many while the job market was pumping, VC was flowing, and the BigCorps were hiring and spending money like crazy. So people didn't feel particularly exploited. But I'm expecting the bias in the community will shift back to copyleft as the BigCorps show their true nature with the rounds of layoffs, mandatory RTO, cutbacks in perks, etc. Why spend a single moment of your time doing unpaid hours doing free work for these people? I've personally gone back to putting my (modest and used by nobody, to be fair) projects under GPLv3.
    - enriquto 3y ago
      > I've personally gone back to putting my (modest and used by nobody, to be fair) projects under GPLv3. Consider using the AGPL. Your users will be better protected by that. (If they use your software via third-party server, the middlemen cannot forbid your users to access and modify your source code.)
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        If you think “your users” could include those middlemen, GPL might provide that subset of your users more useful/usable rights. There are reasons for all three of GPL, LGPL, and AGPL to exist. No one of them is best for all circumstances of software.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        To me it's a balance of things. If I want to ever take external contributions, it's even harder with AGPL. So GPLv3 is sort of the compromise. The stuff I write isn't likely to be used by anybody who isn't "weird" and nerdy anyways so I don't fear theft from SaaS right now.
      - NavinF 3y ago
        In practice AGPL is treated like a source-available license, not an open-source license. Most devs keep their distance from it
        LaGrange 3y ago
        Good.
        enriquto 3y ago
        What a world we live in, mate. What a world.
    - palata 3y ago
      Agreed. I don't really get why some employees push for permissive licenses. As an employee, my code belongs to my company, not to me. If I somehow have to depend on e.g. a GPLv2 project, then suddenly my code gets higher chances of getting public, which is better for me as an employee. Say my company allows me to open source my code, then copyleft is (again) better for me as an employee, because I force other companies (those who would use my code) to publish more of their code.
  - arghwhat 3y ago
    Licenses should be evaluated in context. 1. For anything internal, they already had free work from GPL. They can even modify it - the for them unfortunate side-effects only apply if they need to distribute it to outsiders, as only those receiving a copy need access to the source. 2. For anything external in this particular example, they can either use GPL projects unmodified (no effort required on their part in that case), or they could get all these bits from BSD with a BSD license already and do whatever they want. GPL - and more importantly, AGPL - is definitely important for full-fledged products that can be monetized and abused, with improvements never made available. Note that no common license require any degree of upstream collaboration. coreutils on the other hand isn't such a full product. This project hardly enables anything new - they could just use a BSD userspace or other portable coreutils clone - but if I end up exposed to some included coreutils in a proprietary product, I'd much rather have that they could easily include a proper one. The same logic applies to many other things too.
    - toyg 3y ago
      > GPL - and more importantly, AGPL - is definitely important for full-fledged products that can be monetized and abused With GPL3, that covers pretty much everything from laptops to online databases. Which is why Apple, for example, has worked very hard to rip any GPL code out of their systems. > This project hardly enables anything new - they could just use a BSD userspace or other portable coreutils clone Yes, but it is a competitive disadvantage to ship something less familiar. Again, the Apple example shows most developers would run to replace the shipped utilities with GNU versions instead, which was good for the ecosystem as a whole - less so for Apple, of course, which lost some control on target toolchains and suffered a competitive disadvantage towards Linux machines (minor, sure, but every little helps). It's sad that this particular project is headed by Mozilla people, who are supposed to care about the health of the opensource community as a whole, and still does the wrong thing - probably out of a (vaguely desperate) hunt for widespread adoption of Rust, at the expense of the overall free-software community.
      - sylvestre 3y ago
        This project isn't related to Mozilla at all.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Every time someone has said something to the effect of "it'll never happen" it happens, and then some. You need to understand how evil corporations work. They may be composed of perfectly reasonable people but, taken as a whole, they are literally psychopathic. It's not that they are "waiting" for something to be possible, it's just that at every step they will take anything and everything they can and give back as little as they possibly can. Have you ever been in such a corporation and tried to say you should release source code when you don't have to? You'd be laughed out of the room. Don't be fooled by companies like Microsoft taking part in "open source". They have simply calculated that right now it's advantageous for them to appear that way. But they are always taking the maximum and giving back the minimum, no matter what. We won't change this, but we can raise what that minimum is. That's why we have the GPL.
- mhh__ 3y ago
  Clang on Mac is closed source. We're already swinging back away from being able to know what went into our binaries

ghusbands 3y ago

> Yep. This project is definitely going to be embraced by the community in the long run, and definitely supplant GNU coreutils. The ideologies are completely aligned. By tone, I assume this is sarcasm. Could you perhaps clearly state the issue?

serf 3y ago
here's an OK synopsis of why it's different, even if I don't necessarily agree with the 'style of language' [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383680
- AlienRobot 3y ago
  Wouldn't GPL be perfectly fine with this if it was a library instead? I don't get it.
  - Deeg9rie9usi 3y ago
    People seem to hate GPL for no reason these days. As you said, since it is no library, GPL would be perfectly fine.
    - baq 3y ago
      They can’t use GPL software at their $DAYJOB most likely.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Often can't contribute either. When I worked at Google, contributing to open source projects was permitted with the right paperwork etc. but there was extra caution around GPL licensed projects, esp V3. Which to me is more of a sign that the GPL actually works than anything else.
        anonymous_sorry 3y ago

PoignardAzur 3y ago

To be clear, the issue is that this code that people produced for free is too free and evil corporations might... what, profit from it more than they currently profit from coreutils' existence until eventually all software is locked and proprietary forever? Sarcasm aside, I don't see how the existence of this code or its hypothetical adoption would hurt anyone. Ideology isn't worth following for its own sake, there has to be a mapping to physical reality, and any mapping that interprets a rewrite of coreutils as bad because it's too permissive is extremely suspect to me. Like, what does the GPL infectiousness even protect here? Coreutils is decades old. Are we worried Microsoft is going to EEE it?

quickthrower2 3y ago
Maybe... AWS release a proprietary source-unavailable CoreUtils that they stick on their VMs. They embrace it! they extend it! And then eventually the average dev needs to use the AWSCoreUtils (source unavailable, restrictive license that you can't sue Bezos etc.) to get anything done as everyone else's bash script assumes it's functionality.
- arccy 3y ago
  instead we have EEE by GNU coreutils on proper POSIX tools and we're forced to install the GNU toolset to make scripts work
  - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
    Please elaborate on the "extinguish" part from GNU/GPL. Edit: Doesnt the existence of uutils already contradict that?
    - Gabrys1 3y ago
      "forced to install the GNU toolset to make scripts work" is the extinguish part to my understanding
  - Gabrys1 3y ago

rcxdude 3y ago

I think at this point the vast majority of linux users are indifferent to the difference between copyleft and non-copyleft licenses (and of those that do care, they are likely to lean against copyleft). Whether this project actually has enough advantages (and small enough disadvantages: compatibility still seems to be far from complete enough) to be adopted by users or distributions is another matter, though.

denotational 3y ago
> and of those that do care, they are likely to lean against copyleft What is this based on? Asking in good faith.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  My impression that the vast majority of linux users who are thinking about code licensing are using it commercially and so copyleft represents an extra burden on them. (also, IMO, copyleft vs non-copyleft doesn't seem to make a huge difference to the outcomes copyleft advocates claim to care about, especially to the average user - most MIT licensed projects still generally receive contributions from people using them commercially, and some GPL projects (linux itself suffering from this greatly) still suffer from being fragmented by proprietary patches and forks, even if the license is being complied with.)
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    I would say copyleft licenses can even be better for a business, since they make sure, that competitors cannot grab and run, but need to contribute back. Businesses just need to understand, that copyleft also applies to the competition, when they use copyleft licensed projects.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Agreed, and as a friend pointed out to me years ago, there's nothing stopping people who author GPLd code from making it clear that if a corporation wants a different licensing arrangement for something that's under GPL, they're perfectly capable of negotiating that with the author and paying for it. That this doesn't happen often shows the motivation of most companies using open source is ultimately ... just looking for free work.

noirscape 3y ago

Your sarcasm aside, GNU doesn't hold the exclusive right to make the coreutils, nor the demand to put them under GPL. After all, they're just an implementation of the POSIX spec (which to be fair tries to implementation match) and non-GPL coreutil utilities do exist (Both OpenBSD and FreeBSD for example have their own set of coreutils that are well, BSD licensed.)

quickthrower2 3y ago
It isn't about that though. Of course GNU doesn't hold that right, who said they did?
- noirscape 3y ago
  Even then I think the amount of people who care about MIT vs. GPL isn't large enough to be relevant. "Communities" (really, just distro maintainers, I don't think most people will install their own coreutils) aren't really that aligned to the GPL as the parent likes to imply they are (the only real license alignment usually is "no proprietary if we can help it", which makes GPL vs MIT equal and probably even leans slightly towards MIT because that permits more functional systems in restrictive environments.) A distro's choice will probably come down to feature completeness, safety down the line and ease of maintenance. In that regard, uutils is a much scarier thing for GPL adherents than the coreutils, which suffer from the classic GNU Project bloat problems as well as being written in C, neither of which will ever be fixed (due to structural GNU Project reasons as well as it just being a 3 decades old software project.)
Diti 3y ago
Where can one read the part of POSIX which describe Coreutils? I always thought those were just GNU tools.
- noirscape 3y ago
  Just check the spec itself. It pretty much describes the expected commandline syntax and behavior for commands the coreutils provide[0]. GNU coreutils is on its own a superset of a part of the POSIX spec (they started as rewrites of several Unix utilities), which mostly means that they added a bunch of extra flags and options. The other half of this is GNU bash which includes the non-command parts of POSIX such as shell syntax. POSIX itself meanwhile is basically a reverse spec (very much like how the C standard isn't really a standard, it's just a collective set of rules all notable C compilers follow); it was made to unify all the various Unix offshoots that were being developed and define a common set of commandline utilities and rules that they all shared. (Nowadays, that's mostly the BSDs, Linux and MacOS. Windows is the only notable OS that doesn't really do anything with POSIX besides a few aliases.) [0]: See for example the POSIX reference for cp and you'll see it's pretty similar to the GNU cp manpage - https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/cp.html https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c...

pjmlp 3y ago

People like to shit on GPL, yet Linux and GCC would never had happened if it wasn't for it. FreeBSD has after all enjoyed lots of upstream collaboration from Sony and Apple. /s I don't care about what UNIX flavour I get to use, had it not been for Linux, most likely I would still enjoy Solaris anyway. Which is what would have happened if BSD wasn't tainted by the lawsuit.

josephg 3y ago
> People like to shit on GPL, yet Linux and GCC would never had happened if it wasn't for it. Why wouldn't it? FreeBSD seems alive and well, and its doing quite well for itself despite not having as many upstream corporate contributions. And why should freebsd care if Apple, Sony and Microsoft repurpose their software? If something I wrote ended up in macos and the PS5 I'd think that was pretty cool.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  You'd think it was pretty cool, sure, we all would... but imagine you lose your job, the job market sucks, etc. you're on your 8th month of unemployment and having a hard time making mortgage payments and you see a company like Sony shipping something based on your own open source stuff... but without contributing back, without attribution, and without compensation? Real world scenarios like this is what led people to embrace the GPL. When times are good, corporate use of open source trickles down to the community in the form of patronage and employment. It is not always the case that this happens during "bad times."
  - tzs 3y ago
    >> If something I wrote ended up in macos and the PS5 I'd think that was pretty cool. > You'd think it was pretty cool, sure, we all would... but imagine you lose your job, the job market sucks, etc. you're on your 8th month of unemployment and having a hard time making mortgage payments and you see a company like Sony shipping something based on your own open source stuff... but without contributing back, without attribution, and without compensation? ...whereas if you had used GPL you would still be unemployed in a lousy job market on your 8th month of unemployment and having a hard time making mortgage payments, but would have some Sony source code to look at and use.

lifthrasiir 3y ago

That happened already, if you haven't noticed yet. Android has used Toybox (0BSD) as its coreutils replacement for a decade. I don't see any reason to particularly criticize uutils for this exact reason at this point.

lucideer 3y ago
> embraced by the community > Android Yes Android is definitely representative of the community...
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  I've interpreted that as the user community, because your statement would be a tautology if it were the free software community instead.
  - lucideer 3y ago
    The "community" in this case would be one having input to selecting which version of coreutils any given distro may bundle. That's typically not users, even in more engaged linux distro projects. It's certainly not android users. And while any corporation is ultimately made up of individuals with presumably some limited autonomy in software dependency choices, it seems a bit of a stretch to refer to google employees as a "community" fitting into this context.
    - lifthrasiir 3y ago
      That's an extremely narrow definition of the community in my opinion. And even that doesn't adaquately consider the vast majority who do have but do not exercise that autonomy---Linux container users won't care if the container is based on GNU coreutils or Busybox or Toybox, they only care about the image footprint. (And this made Alpine Linux huge in the world of containers.) I believe that, even under your definition, it is only a small fraction of that community who explicitly want GNU coreutils. Not necessarily good thing, but just a sad reality.

globular-toast 3y ago

I'm so relieved to find the top comment here is about the licence. The trend towards MIT-style licences and away from the GPL is a worrying one. I don't understand the problem people have with the GPL. The GPL is there to ensure free software stays free forever. In a world with copyright this is the only way to do it. Permissive licences and public domain do not work. Companies like Microsoft hate the GPL. This alone should tell you that you, an individual enthusiast, should probably love it.

tcmart14 3y ago
It depends, like all things. I am fine with the GPL, but there are ways it hinders open source. A primary example, Linux can benefit from BSD and MIT licensed code, but it doesn't go the other way. FreeBSD can not benefit from GPL code. At least on the BSD side of things, that is why the GPL is disliked. As an example, FreeBSD developers can write a filesystem with the BSD license and Linux can sort yoink that code out of the code tree and use it (supposing nothing special needs to be done with interfaces and such). But the reverse isn't true. If Linux developers write a new FS in the linux kernel and throw a GPL on it, FreeBSD can't utilize that code.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  No, FreeBSD can very much benefit from GPL code. The choose not to use it.

david_draco 3y ago

Is it even legal to take a GPL-licensed code, translating to Rust ensuring it is exactly compatible, and then releasing under non-GPL? I thought you would need to extract a clean-room specification from it first, and ideally have separate people extracting the specification and writing the new code.

krylon 3y ago
You can use the man pages as your reference. Another comment also mentioned a test suite. I think using that to check how equivalent your attempt is does not violate the GPL.
Y_Y 3y ago
I had the same thought. This very much feels like a derived work. Since they (aim to) replicate the behaviour if the gnutils, and not just some generic posix utiles then I think it would be hard to argue the GPL doesn't apply in a legal sense. I think in a moral sense it very much is a violation, since the GNU authors presumably intended for their work to be built on only by further copyleft works.

devnullbrain 3y ago

>definitely supplant GNU coreutils If you're going to make facetious arguments, make them towards beliefs held by people who actually exist.

krylon 3y ago

The BSD projects' userlands have been used by other projects. If I want a Unix-like userland that is permissively licensed, I already have several to choose from. Is there any pressing need to be bug-for-bug compatible to the GNU counterpart? (Just to be clear, I am not opposed to this project, but I'm not sure how many people will rejoice and adopt this just because of the license. But I'll admit I am going on vibes here.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Drop in replacement with less license issues, reactionary types endlessly arguing the notion of freedom, code that just works, and lots of development activity. What is there not to like for the likes of Red Hat, Ubuntu, Google, Amazon and others providing Linux based products. In all seriousness, if you remove all non GPL licensed software from your Linux distribution because it's not pure enough, you'll be left with something that is a bit less comprehensive than your average operating system. It would miss things like a UI for example. Because both X Windows and Wayland are MIT licensed. A lot of popular server software that made Linux successful. And generally a lot of stuff that most of the OSS community uses and depend on every day. Like OpenSSH which is BSD licensed. Or things like Apache httpd (for which the Apache license was invented), etc. The GPL vision where all that stuff was going to be GPL licensed just never played out that way. Developers and companies decided otherwise. And this is fine. It's is not a problem that a lot of people believe needs fixing (as evidenced by a lot of non GPL OSS without good GPL alternatives). But of course if you feel otherwise, best of luck fixing that problem. The world runs on software. A lot of that is free and open source. And most of that is not licensed under the GPL.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

FWIW about this topic, gitoxide is another project which seems to be in the vein of "rewrite a fundamental C thing in Rust, and at the same time switch to a non-copyleft license" (in that case, Apache) An unfortunate trend.