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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Btw for me persona problem of this replacement is only license switching from strong copy left to permissive, I don't really like this trend it smells really bad from what corps actuality like more nowadays as fear as fire gpl.I don't know who exactly staying behind rust coreutils but devs just ignore all request about GPL or responding very cold or find any other stupid excuse like they don't wanna deal with it. At least they could give their direct point of their views and their motivation about it.but still will not support MIT licence as for main tools for importan core of system
That’s a pretty big problem, I couldn’t care less about the language. But stepping away from GPL is not good at all.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what the worst case scenario is... like, is some company going to get rich off of their proprietary
cpandsudoimplementation that they forked off of an open one?It's one thing when a company gets the benefits of people's contributions and doesn't give back (in the form of source code when they build upon it and at the time they offer binary files). If a company wants to do the work themselves.. well now they don't have too.
GPL promoters typically value software freedom, and may believe it's generally bad for society when software is proprietary. I don't know what coreutlis does but I doubt there's a thoughtful reason to choose MIT license for a clone.
Apple is ok with GPLv2 Bash. Linux kernel is GPLv2, GNU coreutils are GPLv3. Systemd is curiosly also GPLv2. Striping GNU out of GNU/Linux might not be so innocent.
I understand the sentiment.
The move to a permissive license opens the door for these tools to possibly become closed source one day.
You know that you can change license of software that you own copyright to? You can take GPL code and change it to something else, but you can’t un-GPL existing released code. It’s the same thing with MIT.
The only people bound by the license are people who use it because it is licensed to them.
The difference is that organisation may develop MIT software without publishing their code.
That's just it though. The developers can drop out over time, then some other corp can come in and control it, then close source it.
That's a bit short-sighted. On the level of the individual project you are right, it's the dev's choice. And I think permissive licenses also have a place with security critical software like crypto libraries, where everyone benefits from secure libraries being used as much as possible, even in proprietary software.
But on an ecosystem level, this trend to permissive licensing is very worrying, because if it reaches a critical mass, it opens us up to EEE scenarios. Android is already bad enough, only made bearable by Google having to release much of the source code. Imagine what it would be like today if Google had succeeded with their Fuchsia efforts. So we should at least be wary and give a little pushback to this trend. It's valid to question if everything under the sun has to be rewritten and if it does, why does it have to be permissive licensing? What's the end goal?
This is what it's all about. We all know this.