I posted this over /r/StallmanWasRight and I am not sure it would be taken well at /r/Rust so here we are.
I have been getting into Rust in the last year but the licensing ecosystem of Rust crates makes me perplexed.
Today I came along this project https://github.com/uutils/coreutils that is trying to rewrite GNU coreutils in Rust and it is likely over the years projects like this one will overshadow many of the legacy GNU projects.
They are almost all made on “permissive” licenses that will give so much more power to corporations, in fact I am absolutely sure all these (big) rewrites are sponsored by corporations to escape the GNU safeguards that were built to protect users and society.
Does anyone else see this or am I just too paranoid ?
EDIT: It is not my intention to single out any specific project/team. Instead, I aim to initiate a meaningful discussion regarding the licensing choice. Rust is likely the first language since C that holds the capability to effectively replace the decades old, legacy libraries.
projects like this one – aren’t a novel thing, though. BSD userlands, clang, alpine linux, etc. have existed for a while; & corps have sponsored them to some degree. What makes this rust initiative different?
Does anyone else see this or am I just too paranoid ?
IMO you are being paranoid. Corporations don’t care about these utilities. They can build stuff using coreutils under the GPL without major issue. Unless they modify the source of the coreutils its self they don’t have to share anything. So it does not really matter what license it is under. And really these tools are extremely basic - not exactly hard to rewrite any of them from scratch if required (as prof of all the different implementations out there, like this and busybox to name two).
I highly doubt these are sponsored by any big corp, just hobbyists/students that think it is interesting project to undertake that don’t care as much about the GPL as much as they care about doing something interesting to them.
I highly doubt these are sponsored by any big corp, just hobbyists/students that think it is interesting project to undertake that don’t care as much about the GPL as much as they care about doing something interesting to them.
I wanted to test this theory, quickly looking at the commit history you can see that although the project might have started as a hobby/student weekend project, it is currently maintained by someone with an official affiliation of director at Mozilla corp.
PS: I am not pointing the finger to any entity here, I picked this project as an example to have a discussion on this topic.
it is currently maintained by someone with an official affiliation of director at Mozilla corp.
So, the person that started it as a hobby got hired at a relevant field? That in of its self does not mean much. Most people that work on OSS technology are funded in some form by a company. Very very few people are funded by purely by the community or have an unrelated job and everyone needs to earn a living to eat. And it is not uncommon to get hired for the work you have done in your spare time, even if that work never gets used by the company.
This is not an uncommon story overall.
I am absolutely sure all these (big) rewrites are sponsored by corporations to escape the GNU safeguards
Interesting idea, never thought of that and I don’t think it is impossible.
But I don’t see it, there are 400+ contributors and uutils group are students and someone working from home.
As I see it, we are finally getting new tools and all because we got new fancy fast and memory safe language. Community is growing, learning and making new apps.
One problem I have seen (thou I don’t know about this project) is low code quality, but that’s expected until we find best practices with rust.
But I never thought about licenses.
One thing I can imagine is even something like unconscious “self censorship”, choosing more permissive license to attract more people and even corporations which will hire developers…
But I also understand that people want more permissive license than gnu.
Thank you for idea, I will keep an eye on it.
One thing I can imagine is even something like unconscious “self censorship”, choosing more permissive license to attract more people and even corporations which will hire developers…
This is the result of years of anti-copyleft propaganda which started to pay off. Now, all that corps need to do is wait for new projects and libraries to pop up and subtly (more than often openly) allocate resources to whichever project they need, or simply EEE. A much easier exercise than it was during the early years of copyleft where we could literally have a free alternate operating system to Microsoft, Apple and IBM while they were openly fighting it. Read on the Education and Government Incentives program for a reminder of what corporations are capable of.
The Rust community has usually favoured more permissive licenses for some reason
That is because GPL libraries are a pain for corporations. And popular languages like rust are built by corporations and a lot of the libraries for them are built by corporations. Rust would not be the same language as it is today without their contributions. If it were all GPL far few companies would want to use it so far fewer developers would be able to use it which would stunt its popularity. This is also true of python libraries and npm libraries which are mostly under permissive licences.
The GPL is also incompatible with modern appstores, which makes them less valuable. I personally don’t touch anything GPL for work, only for hobby projects.
Here’s the explanation: https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-05-app-store-compliance
That only talks about the Apple app store licence. Not App stores in general. All depends on the licence they impose on the apps. Flatpak, snap, flathub for instance are all app stores that distrabute lots of opensource code, some of which if GPL.
Yeah, I didn’t refer to those. Google’s and Microsoft’s store have the same issue probably, though.
across all languages, most new projects are published under MIT or similar.
