it's interesting how the move away from the gpl is never explicitly justified as a license issue: instead, people always have some plausible technical motivation. with clang/llvm it was the lower compile times and better error messages; with these coreutils it's "rust therefore safer". the license change was never even addressed

i believe they have to do this exactly bc permissive licenses appeal to libertarian/apolitical types who see themselves as purely rational and changing a piece of software bc of the license would sound too... ideological...

so the people in charge of these changes always have a plausible technical explanation at hand to mask away the political aspect of the change

Add to this, the constant badmouthing of GNU and FSF from the crony bootlickers and sadly this is what we get

The tech crowd is also more of a consumer kind these days than the hacky kind, so it's much easier to push corporate shite with a little bit of polish on top

"apolitical" tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.

This, I understand.

laissez-faire "libertarians" who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL

This, I do not. Apologies for my tone in the next paragraph but I'm really pissed off (not directed at you):

WHAT RESTRICTIONS???? IF YOU LOT HAD EVEN A SHRED OF SYMPATHY FOR THE COMMUNITY YOU WOULD HAVE BOYCOTTED THE MIT AND APACHE LICENSE BY NOW. THIS IS EQUIVALENT TO HANDING CORPORATIONS YOUR WORK AND BEGGING THEM TO SCREW OVER YOUR WORK AND THE FOSS COMMUNITY.

I feel a bit better but not by much. This makes me vomit.

Freedom for the rich and powerful to fuck over society and everyone else!

Yeah, that's all there's to it, along with pure ignorance. In a past not so ideologically developed life, I've written code under Apache 2 because it was "more free." Understanding licenses, their implications, the ideologies behind them and their socioeconomic effects isn't trivial. People certainly aren't born educated in those, and often they reach for the code editor before that.

getting rid of the gpl is the motivation behind e.g. companies sponsoring clang/llvm so hard right now

And there it is. Follow the money.

They are maliciously harming the community. They need to be named and shamed. I still seethe at OpenBSD using it. Why is it so hard for them to understand? Why do they want to give away their work for the taking to corporations who just want to make money off of their backs?

Some people might say that so many companies contributing free and open code to clang/llvm instead of GCC is real world evidence against the idea that companies only contribute to free software because the GPL makes them. Or even that permissive licenses can lead to greater corporate sharing than the GPL does. Why does Apple openly contribute to LLVM but refuse to ship GPL3 anything?

According to the web, Red Hat is the most evil company in Open Source. They are also the biggest contributor to Xorg and Wayland. Those are MIT licensed. Why don’t they just keep all their code to themselves? The license would allow it after all. Why did they license systemd as GPL? They did not have to.

The memory allocator used in my distro was written by Microsoft. I have not paid them a dime and I enjoy “the 4 freedoms” with the code they gave me because it is completely free software. Guess what license it uses?

You could do that. MIT is a very free license.

Of course, that would only be a useful thing to do if you were also going to contribute to the code.

Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available

Apple makes the source code for many open source things they distribute available, but often only long after they have shipped binaries. And many parts of their OS which they developed in-house which could also be called "core utilities" are not open source at all.

Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.

I wohld agree, because you really downplay the scenario.

As soon as you accidentallt create something, which everyone starts to use or has an use case, then some Cooperation will copy that thing, make it better and make your community dissappear because there is the newer tool which you cant change the code of anymore and need to use a monthly subscription or something to even use.

So, it somehow seems like you're gaslighting yourself by downplaying the use case.

Mostly it will be small buisnesses and hobbyists, which I would like to code for them too. Especially when they are nice and friendly. But as soon as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon gets hands on it and sees a potential to squeeze money through it by destroying it, then they will surely do it.

I understand that if your boss tells you to write MIT/Proprietary code, you do so. I just wish that the ones who had a choice would use GPL

For small programs the FSF/GNU even suggests considering not using the GPL https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html

Yeah, specifically for something like coreutils I can't see the malicious endgame that is suggested by others here. Is the fear that a proprietary version of cat or pwd or printf takes over the ecosystem and then traps users into a nonfree agreement? Or a proprietary coreutils superset that offers some new tool and does the same thing? Or a proprietary coreutils that generates profit for businesses without attribution to the developers? What would stop anyone from just writing their own proprietary set of tools to do the same thing now, even if uutils didn't exist? Clearly not much, since uutils did exactly that (minus the proprietary bit).

I personally don't see a compelling reason to change to MIT, but I also don't see the problem.

I guess I can't really fault that. Developers not interested in the license they use to publish code baffles me

not sure how it would be more difficult to make money using gpl tools

Only if they make changes/improvements to the code. If it's a library that is used then no, AFAIK you don't need to. If everyone using GPL code had to make their entire project FOSS then TPLink and DLink wouldn't have any market share. The only reason OpenWRT exists is because Linksys was forced to open up their code because they had illegally refrained from opensourcing their code, which was a great positive for the community