this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
7 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
64816 readers
758 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think I'll ever understand the constant complaints about the license. If it were the kernel or some software that was particularly unique, then I'd understand. However, there are many existing implementations of the coreutils programs that are already under permissive licenses. If someone didn't want to use the GPL, they could just use one of those. This is partly why it is incredibly fiddly to write cross-platform shell scripts.
The mit license allows someone (some company) to modify the open source codebase and sell the result without making their modifications public.
It allows the software equivalent of the enclosure of the commons.
If there was a particularly large or significant and widespread codebase —like for example the coreutils— that was used everywhere and mit licensed, a company could make their own slightly different coreutils without publicizing the differences and use their position in the market to enclose the commons of knowledge about the use of that software. Such a situation would lead to a fractured feature ecosystem and confusion around best practices. In that environment, the biggest and most popular software distributor would benefit because their product would be most common and therefore the best target to design around.
I know there’s a lot of “coulds” and “woulds” in that sentence, but that’s exactly what happened in the 80s and 90s with the ostensibly open source Unix codebase and the reason why the gpl was invented.
That is not equivalent to closure of the commons, that's some company spinning a proprietary version of something. If they try to sell it, most people won't buy - most people will continue to use the FOSS version. The people they sell it to may enjoy the proprietary enhancements, but that doesn't prevent the FOSS community from developing those enhancements in the open if they so choose.
MIT license is not a software patent.
The enclosure of the commons.
It’s a thing that happened a long time ago during the Industrial Revolution in England where land that people used to grow subsistence or cash crops for their own use as opposed to their lords use (land called the commons) was fenced in and given to newly elevated lords as estates.
The effect was that people who could live in villages before were forced to move to the cities and live in slums or poorhouses and became laborers in mills.
E: clarity
It's already fractured, as I literally mentioned. That's why it's hard to write cross-platform scripts. Part of the reason it's fractured is that the implementations most commonly in use other than GNU coreutils are permissively licensed and thus cannot easily adopt unique features from GNU coreutils.
In any case, at this point, changing the coreutils license itself will not materially change much in terms of how fractured the existing landscape is given that people could already use Busybox, Toybox, programs from any of the BSD userlands, etc. if they didn't want to use GNU coreutils for whatever reason.
If it doesn’t matter then why not use the original projects license?
I know you’re not able to read minds or responsible for the greater rust community but how come when I or anyone else asks the above question of any mit licensed rust project is the answer never “huh, I guess if the license doesn’t matter then we can gpl it no problem!” And always “no, and get your politics out of my code!”
It clearly matters to someone because everyone’s feet are always dug in to the sand about sticking with mit.
Do you make your learning projects that you don't really care about GPL? I don't.
The reason people don't want to GPL stuff like this is it's bothersome to change it and get support from the existing contributors who are actually, you know, contributing to the project. The "get your politics out of my code" thing (for the license) is at this point because some completely random person who has no relevance to the project coming by, screaming about the GPL, and subsequently spawning a massive MIT vs. GPL debate/mudslinging contest is incredibly annoying. I'd frankly be tempted to keep it non-GPL just to spite anyone who does that. It's a different thing if people who are actually relevant to the project consider doing it.
EDIT: I noticed this is a different subthread than I was thinking it was, so for context the project was started as a single person's way to learn Rust using relatively easy to implement programs (with easy to access docs). Also, elsewhere someone mentioned forking. In that vein, I largely think this entire discussion is completely unserious because there has been a over a decade for someone to fork it in one of the drive-by license complaints, or even through complaints like here, yet no one has done anything.
The code in question is a rewrite of a gpl licensed c package in rust under the mit license.
The “completely random person with no relevance to the project” specifically in reference to uutils-coreutils, but I will stand on the assessment for every other rust/mit rewrite of a c/gpl package, is in every instance a contributor, maintainer or user of the gpl package it’s based on and therefore neither random or irrelevant.
They are always people saying “hey, we wanna help but your license is standing in the way, why not change it so we can more easily work together?” Or “this project is great but the license is too permissive, since the thing it’s based on got by great with gpl, couldn’t the license be changed to gpl?”
Forking over license would be counterproductive and silly when the thing in question is a reimplementation of a gpl package. Literally just use the license that the original work had!
From my perspective the people asking rust/MIT rewrites of gpl/c stuff to go back to gpl are being perfectly reasonable and have every possible definition of standing to make that request and always get treated as interlopers.
I believe you about the spite thing though. People do be spiteful.
While you’re right that this isn’t the thread about someone’s private learning project (btw, allowed under gpl), plenty of personal learning projects have changed license when they grew beyond the scope of just some guy messing around.
Part of refactoring during that growth includes administration and licenses are part of that.
Projects I have personally written had to have a license applied or changed when their scope changed.
I think especially once several companies employees are acting in their official capacities in the project it’s very reasonable to bring up the license!
We havent even touched on the violation of the gpl aspect, where no programmer and certainly not one using a llm could be reasonably thought to be ignorant of the gpl coreutils inner workings and doing a clean room implementation which is what is legally required to not be considered a derivative work!
Decades ago the gpl assholes had to figure out that you can’t use the license to stop Sony from doing something you won’t use it to stop your neighbor from doing.
The way around that is to make the rust rewrite gpl.
There are constantly random people complaining who literally have never been involved with GNU coreutils (or frankly any GNU project at all) or uutils. If all the people complaining worked on GNU projects, they'd have a truly astounding supply of contributors.
People say this in the other direction as well.
I suppose you complain about this when the BSD folks reimplement functionality present in Linux or other GPL projects. To put it bluntly, uutils isn't GNU coreutils. It's an implementation of the utilities trying to get as close as possible to the same functionality, but it will likely never truly "replace" GNU coreutils (as long as the latter is still being developed, at least).
This is completely ridiculous. How does "no programmer ... could be reasonably thought to be ignorant of the gpl coreutils inner workings" even make sense to you? Under this thought process, it's impossible to make a clean room implementation at all because you cannot be "ignorant of the [XYZ project] inner workings" if you implement the same functionality. I suppose all the BSDs are in violation of the GPL since they have implemented roughly the same functionality. Not to mention Toybox.
lol at “users don’t count”
Lol I guess everyone who uses Linux and has contributed absolutely nothing to the kernel should be taken quite seriously when they drive-by on the kernel mailing list and start complaining about the management of the project.
Yes.
Open source is more than code, it’s software for everyone including non programmers.
You don't need to be a programmer to contribute. That's just your bias. Anyway, I'm done with this.
So open source is only for people who already in the club then? Who gets to have a say? What are the restrictions on that say?
MIT defenders are laveyian satanists until someone has an opinion they disagree with lol.
I’m genuinely astounded that a recurring argument for simply dismissing suggestions to change the license to the one the original project had is “that’s my purse, I don’t know you!”
I could understand where you’re coming from if the people were, to a man, rude and demanding. Having read lots of threads about rust/mit rewrites of c/gpl stuff and participated in several, they’re pretty often just like me: politely presenting a perfectly reasonable argument even when met with very defensive pushback.
The requirements are not at all strict. Submit even one bug report or issue, or do literally anything positive rather than show up for the first time and whine about the management of the project or whatever out of nowhere and then maybe people will take your opinion more seriously.
The threads are indeed filled with people like you given that in a number of your posts you went and complained about Rust as a whole. This is ignoring that the other highly upvoted (license-related) top-level post in this very thread (before it got deleted by mods) called the project maintainers cucks and so on.
Anyway, now I'm actually done.
Wow, where are those requirements published? I’m sure more people would follow the rules of the project if it were made clear that input is contingent upon some existing level of community involvement…
Of course, I have never seen such rules put in place except to exclude the most base mlm scam spammers on mailing lists, but that’s neither here nor there.
Shouldn’t my obvious willingness to engage with people about this topic serve as some sort of indicator that I’m serious and not “drive by”?
Shouldn’t the fact that I’m not being rude or crass like the other poster you brought up (to achieve rhetorical ends I’m not exactly clear on!) be an indicator that my input should be taken seriously?
Given that you replied quite positively to the dude who wrote about the maintainers being "cucks" and keep talking about the "perverse incentives of rust," the answer is no.
I'm going to block you now, byebye.
Just literally finding any reason to say no.
E: I want to be a little more clear, rather than policing language or tone, I responded to help that person understand. The mods did what they do and I believe rightly removed the offending posts.
I do believe the conditions around rust at the present moment create a perverse incentive. Because rust is a common language for junior developers and commonly has mit licenses and is very well suited to llm analysis from a running heap or code perspective it ends up being very useful and attractive to companies who want to get rid of senior devs, use more ai and not have to contribute their work back to the public.
That’s a perverse incentive.
Is rust-coreutils being developed by Canonical? Then it sounds like shooting themselves in the foot. Why give competitors a chance to take over a vital package that is at the core of their OS?
How is MIT a "chance to take over"? It's a chance to go proprietary with future enhancements, but that's far from a takeover.
I'm no licensing expert and I was responding to the previous comment that said someone can fork it and then make it proprietary. So If they already have dominant market position, they could force people to use a proprietary version.
Well, yeah, if they have a dominant market position, they can force their customers to do just about anything.
mit lets companies take them without contributing back critical stuff like security fixes.
their money and resources are very important to keep foss alive and this relies a lot on the gpl because it just means they are forced to take some responsibility for the projects they use to make their billions.
That's great, except they could already just use a permissively licensed implementation. This is in fact what a lot of companies already do. For instance, Android uses Toybox, macOS uses utilities originally ripped from NetBSD (mostly), etc.
Generally, a lot of companies also don't contribute back fixes upstream. They'll often just dump the code in some hidden away corner of their site as a giant source blob.
For something like coreutils, where a significant change is sort of unlikely in the first place, thinking the GPL makes a difference is bizarre to me.
So why did they choose to use permissive license instead of the license of the original?
Because it was started as a project to learn Rust by one dude.
Also, that was back when Rust had bad documentation (at least a couple years before 1.0), so by far the easiest way to learn was by making something like this and looking through other existing projects like the compiler or Servo.
That doesn't answer the question why use different license than the original. And why not change the license/fork to gpl when it became more than a fun project. As we see it is a major issue with the project.
Being able to take someone else's code used as a learning exercise for your own learning without worrying about it being GPL'd is quite useful. You seem to be arguing permissive licenses should never be used, which I think is ridiculous. A project meant to just learn about XYZ language/framework/whatever by implementing "simple" tasks is one of the most basic examples of a project that should be under a permissive license.
The only thing that could realistically be done is to license all changes going forward as GPL. If someone wanted to fork the project to do something like that, they could. But of course no one will bother, because the people who are terminally rabid online about this project not being under the GPL contribute to neither this project nor GNU coreutils.
It is not a major issue. It's only really an "issue" at all because people who don't contribute and likely would never contribute anyway constantly complain about it. I will state this again: there are multiple already existing implementations of the coreutils programs, so there is practically nothing keeping companies tied to it. There is little actual benefit to the coreutils programs in particular being under the GPL.
I didn't. Though I do think there's a reason why Linux is actively developing by corporations and FreeBSD while being used by corps is not.
That's not what the project is now though, it's a project that in effect relicenses core system components under the pretence of using safer language.
Obviously not for you but given how license concerns turn up each time, it is for many people.