This is a follow-up to Jon’s original post on Carefully (but purposefully) oxidising Ubuntu and Julian’s migration spec for 25.10. We promised transparency throughout this process, and this post is written in that spirit. What happened after the announcement Following the decision to adopt rust-coreutils, we got to work. Any package shipped by default in Ubuntu must be promoted to Ubuntu Main, which requires passing a thorough security review. We quickly assembled an internal team spanning Ubun...
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.
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.