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No mention of the relicensing going on. All the GNU utilities are GPL licensed. At a time when relicensing and other rug pulls are making headlines I find it d

No mention of the relicensing going on. All the GNU utilities are GPL licensed. At a time when relicensing and other rug pulls are making headlines I find it disturbing that so many developers are going with "permissive" licenses for their recreation of things in Rust. Edit: not technically relicensing, which would not be legal. They are writing functional clones from scratch under a new license.

reactordev 1y ago
Not relicensing at all, just simply adhering to a spec, as the GNU tools do. Can we get down from the soap box now on rewrites? People are free to reimplement anything if there’s a spec and no law against it. Derivative works only works when there is no public record of a specification prior to an IP introducing it. A copyright. IANAL but I’m pretty sure that’s how that works. If you can prove they copied code, sure, it’s derivative. If you can prove they started from a fork, maybe you have a case. Starting from scratch is about as this is new as it gets.
- NamlchakKhandro 1y ago
  Not sure this person is claiming code is being copied, but instead claiming there's a bad legal footgun happening. History has shown that the original tools used the correct license, these new ones are like optimistic clones leaving vault 13.
  - ummonk 1y ago
    Do you have examples of undesirable situations arising that would not have been prevented by selecting the GPL instead of a permissive license?
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      FreeBSD and Sony's PlayStation, Nintendo's Switch and Apple's macOS/iOS. Compare this to Steam's SteamOS, Proton, etc, all of which are built on top of copyleft software, and everyone benefits from it. I'm not a Steam customer or SteamOS user, but Steam's changes to Wine help me out everyday. Similarly, Steam's use of Linux on their Steam Deck has lead to kernel changes that benefit all Linux users with AMD hardware. Meanwhile, you can't even use modern WiFi or Bluetooth on FreeBSD despite platforms built on top of it all having solved that problem a decade, or more, ago
      - reactordev 1y ago
        Don’t bash FreeBSD, it’s not their fault. It’s entirely the fault of the corporations that decided not to trunk their changes upstream for the betterment of the community. Their bespoke flavor of BSD dies with them.
        ummonk 1y ago
        GP’s point is that the corporations would have been forced to open source their changes (thus allowing FreeBSD to incorporate them) if FreeBSD had been GPL-licensed. I disagree of course, as FreeBSD has benefited significantly from corporate adoption —- especially Apple’s porting of FreeBSD userland —- and that corporate adoption would never have occurred had FreeBSD not distinguished itself from Linux by being permissive licensed.
        heavyset_go 1y ago
        I agree with both of your points. My point is that you can't rely on the goodwill of corporations when you're building the commons. They will happily wall off the commons you and others cultivated for themselves. They need to be incentivized into being good citizens instead of just mooching. Maybe if companies were incentivized to give back to FreeBSD, it could be a viable competitor to Linux when it comes to hardware and standards we've taken for granted for the last two decades. That's a world I'd rather live in.
- o11c 1y ago
  Counterpoint: usually there is no spec, and you have to look at the actual tool to figure out what's going on. For closed-source binaries there's a clear escalation between "run the tool and see what it seems to do" and "disassemble the code to really know" (which is supposed to ), but with open-source, the source code is just there to steal. We known open-source theft (in the non-ironic sense) is common. And we know at least one of the Rust repos had to have its history rewritten due to a license violation of some sort. It isn't a major jump to assume there's GPL-violation in the tool-rewrites too.
  - aw1621107 1y ago
    > And we know at least one of the Rust repos had to have its history rewritten due to a license violation of some sort. Which repo(s), for those of us who may have been out of the loop?
    - o11c 1y ago
      Sorry, I don't remember any details, just the pain of trying to update forks (and I was only peripherally involved in the ecosystem then, and not at all now).
      - aw1621107 1y ago
        Ah, no worries. Does sound like a bit of a pain to deal with.
- amiga386 1y ago
  > People are free to reimplement anything if there’s a spec and no law against it. Yeah, but if they rewrite GPL tools to corpo-friendly licenses, I'm going to call them corporate bootlickers. Or useful idiots. Corporations are looking to capture the value of your voluntary labour and sell/rent access to your work for their exclusive profit. You offer software with no requirement to share changes and nobody shares changes, it's just corpos asking you code for them for free *surprised pikachu face*
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
crote 1y ago
I have mixed feelings about this. On paper you're of course right and a copyleft license would be better, but in practice I don't think it matters all that much for something as small as coreutils. It's just yet another implementation of a standardized interface, nobody is going to fork it and build a billion-dollar business around it. Any change or improvement is probably worth more when upstreamed than when kept in a proprietary fork, just because your maintenance burden is lessened. Besides, we've evolved a bit since the 90s/00s: the main risk to software freedom is no longer binary blobs but cloud services - and the GPL doesn't save you there. And any license requiring disclosing your coreutils to anyone accessing your computer over the internet would be a massive dealbreaker to most people...
- endgame 1y ago
  But the large volume of copyleft does make it much easier for all the BSD/MIT/X11/ISC ("permissively licenced") stuff to show up in e.g., enterprise Linux distribution releases, under the "we have to do it anyway for all these other packages, so we may as well do it for all the FOSS code that we use" type of argument. There was a kerfuffle with RHEL a couple of years back, where they tried to provide sources only to paying customers. Not sure where that ends up.
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  Coreutils licensing is just one part of the amalgamation that prevents the Nintendo Switch-ification (it's based on FreeBSD) of entire free software stacks. Not only do non-Switch users not benefit from changes, the entity that made billions on top of free software then uses that war chest to sue free software developers into oblivion. I think licensing is an important way to prevent those types of abuses, and to maximize users' benefits.
  - jchw 1y ago
    The "Horizon" OS used on the Nintendo Switch is not FreeBSD-based, it merely contains some FreeBSD code, but is largely, as far as I am aware, a home-grown proprietary operating system not substantially based on any "free" system. The Sony PlayStation 4 (and probably PlayStation 5) actually are substantially based on FreeBSD, though.
ChuckMcM 1y ago
There is a growing sentiment that the GPL is the one source of the inability to derive economic benefit from doing productive software work. That was kind of explicit in RMS' manifesto, he was pissed off that people were charging $5,000 for a C compiler that "a competent engineer could write in a week", but if you remove all options of collecting some of the value that people who are getting paid by shipping you're code, it not only de-incentivizes development, the entire ecosystem is at risk.
- calvinmorrison 1y ago
  yeah cause charging for floppy distribution is evil, putting mmpeg behind a saas products totally ok!
- kazinator 1y ago
  > is the one source of the inability to derive economic benefit from doing productive software work So, evidently, not enough people have been exploited for big $$$ by platforms run on FOSS infrastructure, important parts of which are GPL licensed.
- aaron_m04 1y ago
  Who specifically is saying this?
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    It's a rhetorical device. We're not meant to take it literally.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- toofy 1y ago
  this ‘growing sentiment’ has always been there. particularly with the crowd who persistently wants to lock everything behind a monthly subscription or insert hidden data collecting. if the ‘growing sentiment’ wants to, they’re quite free to write their own code and use literally any license they want. disturbingly, i’ve heard more than a few of these people upset because they can’t take our code that we gpl’d intentionally and lock it away stealing it as their own.

reactordev 1y ago

Not relicensing at all, just simply adhering to a spec, as the GNU tools do. Can we get down from the soap box now on rewrites? People are free to reimplement anything if there’s a spec and no law against it. Derivative works only works when there is no public record of a specification prior to an IP introducing it. A copyright. IANAL but I’m pretty sure that’s how that works. If you can prove they copied code, sure, it’s derivative. If you can prove they started from a fork, maybe you have a case. Starting from scratch is about as this is new as it gets.

NamlchakKhandro 1y ago
Not sure this person is claiming code is being copied, but instead claiming there's a bad legal footgun happening. History has shown that the original tools used the correct license, these new ones are like optimistic clones leaving vault 13.
- ummonk 1y ago
  Do you have examples of undesirable situations arising that would not have been prevented by selecting the GPL instead of a permissive license?
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    FreeBSD and Sony's PlayStation, Nintendo's Switch and Apple's macOS/iOS. Compare this to Steam's SteamOS, Proton, etc, all of which are built on top of copyleft software, and everyone benefits from it. I'm not a Steam customer or SteamOS user, but Steam's changes to Wine help me out everyday. Similarly, Steam's use of Linux on their Steam Deck has lead to kernel changes that benefit all Linux users with AMD hardware. Meanwhile, you can't even use modern WiFi or Bluetooth on FreeBSD despite platforms built on top of it all having solved that problem a decade, or more, ago
    - reactordev 1y ago
      Don’t bash FreeBSD, it’s not their fault. It’s entirely the fault of the corporations that decided not to trunk their changes upstream for the betterment of the community. Their bespoke flavor of BSD dies with them.
      - ummonk 1y ago
        GP’s point is that the corporations would have been forced to open source their changes (thus allowing FreeBSD to incorporate them) if FreeBSD had been GPL-licensed. I disagree of course, as FreeBSD has benefited significantly from corporate adoption —- especially Apple’s porting of FreeBSD userland —- and that corporate adoption would never have occurred had FreeBSD not distinguished itself from Linux by being permissive licensed.
      - heavyset_go 1y ago
        I agree with both of your points. My point is that you can't rely on the goodwill of corporations when you're building the commons. They will happily wall off the commons you and others cultivated for themselves. They need to be incentivized into being good citizens instead of just mooching. Maybe if companies were incentivized to give back to FreeBSD, it could be a viable competitor to Linux when it comes to hardware and standards we've taken for granted for the last two decades. That's a world I'd rather live in.
o11c 1y ago
Counterpoint: usually there is no spec, and you have to look at the actual tool to figure out what's going on. For closed-source binaries there's a clear escalation between "run the tool and see what it seems to do" and "disassemble the code to really know" (which is supposed to ), but with open-source, the source code is just there to steal. We known open-source theft (in the non-ironic sense) is common. And we know at least one of the Rust repos had to have its history rewritten due to a license violation of some sort. It isn't a major jump to assume there's GPL-violation in the tool-rewrites too.
- aw1621107 1y ago
  > And we know at least one of the Rust repos had to have its history rewritten due to a license violation of some sort. Which repo(s), for those of us who may have been out of the loop?
  - o11c 1y ago
    Sorry, I don't remember any details, just the pain of trying to update forks (and I was only peripherally involved in the ecosystem then, and not at all now).
    - aw1621107 1y ago
      Ah, no worries. Does sound like a bit of a pain to deal with.
amiga386 1y ago
> People are free to reimplement anything if there’s a spec and no law against it. Yeah, but if they rewrite GPL tools to corpo-friendly licenses, I'm going to call them corporate bootlickers. Or useful idiots. Corporations are looking to capture the value of your voluntary labour and sell/rent access to your work for their exclusive profit. You offer software with no requirement to share changes and nobody shares changes, it's just corpos asking you code for them for free *surprised pikachu face*
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

crote 1y ago

I have mixed feelings about this. On paper you're of course right and a copyleft license would be better, but in practice I don't think it matters all that much for something as small as coreutils. It's just yet another implementation of a standardized interface, nobody is going to fork it and build a billion-dollar business around it. Any change or improvement is probably worth more when upstreamed than when kept in a proprietary fork, just because your maintenance burden is lessened. Besides, we've evolved a bit since the 90s/00s: the main risk to software freedom is no longer binary blobs but cloud services - and the GPL doesn't save you there. And any license requiring disclosing your coreutils to anyone accessing your computer over the internet would be a massive dealbreaker to most people...

endgame 1y ago
But the large volume of copyleft does make it much easier for all the BSD/MIT/X11/ISC ("permissively licenced") stuff to show up in e.g., enterprise Linux distribution releases, under the "we have to do it anyway for all these other packages, so we may as well do it for all the FOSS code that we use" type of argument. There was a kerfuffle with RHEL a couple of years back, where they tried to provide sources only to paying customers. Not sure where that ends up.
heavyset_go 1y ago
Coreutils licensing is just one part of the amalgamation that prevents the Nintendo Switch-ification (it's based on FreeBSD) of entire free software stacks. Not only do non-Switch users not benefit from changes, the entity that made billions on top of free software then uses that war chest to sue free software developers into oblivion. I think licensing is an important way to prevent those types of abuses, and to maximize users' benefits.
- jchw 1y ago
  The "Horizon" OS used on the Nintendo Switch is not FreeBSD-based, it merely contains some FreeBSD code, but is largely, as far as I am aware, a home-grown proprietary operating system not substantially based on any "free" system. The Sony PlayStation 4 (and probably PlayStation 5) actually are substantially based on FreeBSD, though.

ChuckMcM 1y ago

There is a growing sentiment that the GPL is the one source of the inability to derive economic benefit from doing productive software work. That was kind of explicit in RMS' manifesto, he was pissed off that people were charging $5,000 for a C compiler that "a competent engineer could write in a week", but if you remove all options of collecting some of the value that people who are getting paid by shipping you're code, it not only de-incentivizes development, the entire ecosystem is at risk.

calvinmorrison 1y ago
yeah cause charging for floppy distribution is evil, putting mmpeg behind a saas products totally ok!
kazinator 1y ago
> is the one source of the inability to derive economic benefit from doing productive software work So, evidently, not enough people have been exploited for big $$$ by platforms run on FOSS infrastructure, important parts of which are GPL licensed.
aaron_m04 1y ago
Who specifically is saying this?
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  It's a rhetorical device. We're not meant to take it literally.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
toofy 1y ago
this ‘growing sentiment’ has always been there. particularly with the crowd who persistently wants to lock everything behind a monthly subscription or insert hidden data collecting. if the ‘growing sentiment’ wants to, they’re quite free to write their own code and use literally any license they want. disturbingly, i’ve heard more than a few of these people upset because they can’t take our code that we gpl’d intentionally and lock it away stealing it as their own.