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Everything in uutils is under the MIT license. The only thing you're missing is the "viral" nature of the GPL. Nobody in the BSD world seems to be particularly

Everything in uutils is under the MIT license. The only thing you're missing is the "viral" nature of the GPL. Nobody in the BSD world seems to be particularly suffering under the thumb of unreleased forks of `chown` and `mkdir`.

desumeku 2y ago
Yes, and if BSD was what everyone used for servers instead of Linux, then there would be nothing stopping Oracle from selling you Oracle BSD for a nice subscription price. Of course, they and red hat are already doing this in their own way that gets around the GPL, but a more permissive license would just allow them to do it even more.
- CamouflagedKiwi 2y ago
  There's nothing stopping Oracle from selling us Oracle Linux for a nice subscription price either. The GPL is explicitly not meant to prevent commercialisation of software.
- jzb 2y ago
  Of all the things that constitute a value ad that might allow Oracle or any other company to sell a premium operating system and do away with reciprocal licensing, the core utilities aren’t it. There are already permissively, licensed versions of most of those tools. If people want to champion the GPL and so forth, this is not the hill to die on it’s not really even a hill. It’s a mole hill. That’s not to say that I undervalue the worth of these utilities, but they are not something that people are going to pay premium prices for.
- stouset 2y ago
  You don’t need to imagine. Apple ships macOS with a BSD user space. The sky has not fallen.
  - immibis 2y ago
    If Linux was the way macOS is, nobody would use it. They'd use macOS, to Apple's great benefit.
    - stouset 2y ago
      I genuinely don't follow your point.
    - superb_dev 2y ago
      I already prefer macOS over Linux for my desktop, to Apple’s great benefit
WD-42 2y ago
What exactly is this BSD world that you speak of? The one that was mined by corporations for years and whom never gave back anything (except value to Apple shareholders). Compare with Linux which was adopted by corporations and were legally forced to give back. Which made more progress?
- IshKebab 2y ago
  > never gave back anything Apart from Clang/LLVM and WebKit you mean? Ok in fairness the LGPL license of KHTML was a huge reason the WebKit source was available (for ages it was just reluctant tarball dumps) but I don't think that's the case for LLVM. I don't think the GPL has really meant corporation's have given back significantly to Linux. There are still plenty of closed source drivers. The main motivation to give back is the extremely high cost of maintaining out-of-tree modifications (e.g. Android's binder).
  - bfrog 2y ago
    LLVM has spawned probably a dozen vendor supplied toolchains that you never see the source for, best of luck figuring out why your program didn't compile correctly, or adding support for something other than the tools/languages provided. The compiler and toolchain really are going the wrong direction with LLVM in terms of open source.
    - cozzyd 2y ago
      Yes Apple's clang weird ass versioning causes all sorts of problems too
    - dzaima 2y ago
      Some proprietary-friendly compiler would've appeared in one way or another at some point. I'd rather such at least have some amount of openness. Better than many crappy from-scratch completely-proprietary vendor compilers at least. And hey some of the work does get upstreamed, which is probably a good choice for the vendor anyway if the target in question isn't intended to be immediately thrown in the thrash and forgotten.

desumeku 2y ago

Yes, and if BSD was what everyone used for servers instead of Linux, then there would be nothing stopping Oracle from selling you Oracle BSD for a nice subscription price. Of course, they and red hat are already doing this in their own way that gets around the GPL, but a more permissive license would just allow them to do it even more.

CamouflagedKiwi 2y ago
There's nothing stopping Oracle from selling us Oracle Linux for a nice subscription price either. The GPL is explicitly not meant to prevent commercialisation of software.
jzb 2y ago
Of all the things that constitute a value ad that might allow Oracle or any other company to sell a premium operating system and do away with reciprocal licensing, the core utilities aren’t it. There are already permissively, licensed versions of most of those tools. If people want to champion the GPL and so forth, this is not the hill to die on it’s not really even a hill. It’s a mole hill. That’s not to say that I undervalue the worth of these utilities, but they are not something that people are going to pay premium prices for.
stouset 2y ago
You don’t need to imagine. Apple ships macOS with a BSD user space. The sky has not fallen.
- immibis 2y ago
  If Linux was the way macOS is, nobody would use it. They'd use macOS, to Apple's great benefit.
  - stouset 2y ago
    I genuinely don't follow your point.
  - superb_dev 2y ago
    I already prefer macOS over Linux for my desktop, to Apple’s great benefit

WD-42 2y ago

What exactly is this BSD world that you speak of? The one that was mined by corporations for years and whom never gave back anything (except value to Apple shareholders). Compare with Linux which was adopted by corporations and were legally forced to give back. Which made more progress?

IshKebab 2y ago
> never gave back anything Apart from Clang/LLVM and WebKit you mean? Ok in fairness the LGPL license of KHTML was a huge reason the WebKit source was available (for ages it was just reluctant tarball dumps) but I don't think that's the case for LLVM. I don't think the GPL has really meant corporation's have given back significantly to Linux. There are still plenty of closed source drivers. The main motivation to give back is the extremely high cost of maintaining out-of-tree modifications (e.g. Android's binder).
- bfrog 2y ago
  LLVM has spawned probably a dozen vendor supplied toolchains that you never see the source for, best of luck figuring out why your program didn't compile correctly, or adding support for something other than the tools/languages provided. The compiler and toolchain really are going the wrong direction with LLVM in terms of open source.
  - cozzyd 2y ago
    Yes Apple's clang weird ass versioning causes all sorts of problems too
  - dzaima 2y ago
    Some proprietary-friendly compiler would've appeared in one way or another at some point. I'd rather such at least have some amount of openness. Better than many crappy from-scratch completely-proprietary vendor compilers at least. And hey some of the work does get upstreamed, which is probably a good choice for the vendor anyway if the target in question isn't intended to be immediately thrown in the thrash and forgotten.