[gregwebs]

Richard Stalman and others that believe the GPL is generally the best license are not against ever using the MIT license. Stalman has been willing to be pragmatic and support tactical choices of other licenses besides GPL when licensing.

So it is worth having some deeper thoughts about what the implications are for different licenses of coreutils. When does using coreutils create a derivative work that requires GPL?

[mrob]

Tactical considerations exist, but even so, a copyleft license might have better long term results in promoting software Freedom. The FSF supported a non-copyleft license for Ogg Vorbis, because at the time it seemed reasonable that this was the best way to fight the (at the time) patent-encumbered MP3 format. But in practice it had little benefit:

"However, we must recognize that this strategy did not succeed for Ogg Vorbis. Even after changing the copyright license to permit easy inclusion of that library code in proprietary applications, proprietary developers generally did not include it. The sacrifice made in the choice of license ultimately won us little."[0]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html

[moonchild]

I don't know when that was written, but vorbis is used pervasively today, including in proprietary applications.