Unrelated to the language debate, but it seems a lot of people here missed the fact that Rust Coreutils project is licensed under MIT, and I am not sure if I feel that it is the appropriate license for such project. As much as FSF's philosophy has bad PR at times with Stallman, the GPL licenses really do protect open source. Who knows what Canonical would do when all parts of Ubuntu become MIT...
They did, until the automatic copyright laundering machine was invented. Pretty much every piece of GPL code ever written is now being magically transmuted into MIT/BSD or proprietary code, and the FSF has no solution.
A discussion on licenses will go sideways very quickly. GPL does limit the adoption of software in certain environments. So it really depends on your goals. Do you want an OSS project that will be useable by everyone (including corporations) or do you want to guarantee that the software will always be OSS and guarantee that Corporations can’t benefit from it without contributing back (potentially requiring them to open their own proprietary code).
There’s a lot of moral perspective that people apply to this decision, but not all developers have the same goals for their software. MIT is more flexible in its use than GPL, but doesn’t help ensure that software remains open.
GPL is copy left, it has a stated goal of encouraging more software to be OSS, including new contributions. That’s what I meant by software remains open. MIT on the other hand can be used in closed source situations. While the original code will remain open, future changes are not required to be open source.
What does “userland” mean in this context? Closed source linux distributions? Closed source apps? What?
The gpl is generally considered to stop at the process boundary. I don’t really understand what you could do with a bsd licensed coreutils you couldn’t do with a gpled coreutils. You could make closed source Linux software which called coreutils in a child process. But by most readings of the gpl, you can do that today.
I suppose a company could fork coreutils and make it closed source, keeping their special extra command line options for themselves. But … I guess I just don’t see the value in that. You can already do that with FreeBSD. Apple does exactly that today. And the sky hasn’t fallen. If anything, it would be a relief to many if Apple’s coreutils equivalents were more compatible with gnu coreutils, because then scripts would be more freely portable between Linux and macOS.
