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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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*
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.
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.
Dual/mutli licensing is one avenue towards effective monetization of GPL code.
GPL use of the code is kosher, if you want to use it without being beholden to the terms of the GPL, you pay for different licensing terms.
That said, the GPL is not always the best license for this and yes, it can lessen the grip you have on extracting profit from code, but the lessened grip is the point of the license.
How many people do you know, who write open source? If you've been in the tech industry at all its probably hundreds if not thousands. How many of them are okay with the GPL when someone used their GPL'd code in a product (and lets say they even provide an obscure URL with source code for that part of it) and that product is making them thousands if not millions of dollars in product revenue.
Nearly every person I know in that position, have been offended by someone making money off their work, and they don't get any of it. That latter bit is especially irksome in most cases. Usually its some rant of "I wrote that code for people to share, not get rich off of!" or something like that. The "Busybox" story[1] is like the poster child here. Once there were successful lawsuits these folks figured out how to have their cake and eat it to. Read up on the Linksys lawsuit[2]. Forcing compliance costs money (lawyers and such) and time and the payoff is pretty much always to the lawyers and not the people who were irritated their software was being profitably sold.
Contrast that with software that has an explicit non-commercial license but offers a commercial license, that stuff gets licensed and the developers get paid when it does, not a bunch of lawyers.
I realize not everyone has grown up with this stuff, the point I was trying to make (poorly it seems) is that as a legal tool to "protect" developers from having others steal their work and profit from it, I feel like it failed utterly to do that. When the company I was at was acquired by IBM back in 2015 I did all of the license clearance work for all of the software in our stack. People who had "permissive" licenses that offered a way for IBM to license it with legal cover, they got whatever they needed (some wanted a token licensing fee, others a donation to FSF or another non-profit), for the parts that were covered under GPL and not available under a different license, IBM just dropped on the floor because of their history with the whole SCO/Linux lawsuits.
I get that folks want to share their code with folks who can use it, I totally support that. I also know that absolutely nobody wants to be called at 3AM to fix. for free, a CVE that their code has because some Enterprise customer paying the caller is all in a twist. Having language in the license at the start that clarifies stuff like that is essential.
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.