[LightFog]

It’s a shame to see all this effort going toward replacing core GPL licensed utilities with permissive ones. It seems like a particularly common thing in the Rust community.

It feels disrespectful of the intentions of the work that went into the tools that are being cloned.

[aulin]

It's not just disrespectful, it's stupid and dangerous. GPL is one of those exceptional things that shaped the world as it is today. These projects are nothing more than an attack to our freedom.

[prmoustache]

Your freedom is not the least impacted by the MIT or BSD licences. The software distributed is and remains free and open source.

[zelphirkalt]

But in the long run freedom could be impacted. Imagine this becoming popular. Then some proprietary fork happens, by some tech giant, which adds some feature that is great. Then lots of people, who did not care for GPL in the first place switch to that proprietary version, because ir is oh so much more convenient. Suddenly distros get pressure to use the new thing. Or people switch to whatever has the proprietary replacement. At some point the majority of the people could be using that, instead of libre software. Perhaps your next employer obligates you to use the proprietary thing, because it is popular and they don't want to deal with people using less common OS.

Whatever the masses do can always have impact on what you can do, or are forced to do. For example quitting your job, because you want to use the libre tool, when your employer tries to force you to use the proprietary tool. "Why can't you be a good employee like eeeeveryone else?"

[prmoustache]

Most distros won't allow proprietary software. When mongodb switched license, most distros stopped providing it. Now that redis also became non-free, distros are pushing the free forks.

[lelanthran]

> Your freedom is not the least impacted by the MIT or BSD licences. The software distributed is and remains free and open source.

Only the original as delivered by the original dev-team. The derivatives can be, and often are, closed off. That's the opposite of "free and open source".

[prmoustache]

But nobody prevents you to continue using the free version. You do not lose anything.

[nicman23]

tell that to ie playstation users that basically use bsd and cannot use the computation of their device for nothing that sony does not permit.

very freedom

[timschmidt]

Xbox, Nintendo's various consoles, and Sony's are all DRM'd to hell and back. If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users. For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.

The Playdate console seems a lot friendlier to developers and end users alike, but that's precisely because they're a smaller player in the market and need that advantage. Same dynamic played out with drivers for SCSI controllers, and GPUs under Linux, where the biggest players were the last to provide quality open source support. Seems to have a lot more to do with market position than with licenses, to me.

[lelanthran]

> If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users.

That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software.

Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very community that they so willingly took this charity from. Yay BSD license!

If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.

> For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.

Well that's why I divided the licenses into "pro-user" and "pro-corporate". The BSDs are pro-corporate.

[timschmidt]

> If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.

Last I checked there were about a thousand open source OSes. Hundreds under BSD-like licenses. Here's a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems

It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. Sorry?

[nicman23]

i mean that is ok but i do not want them using open source commons without any contribution. it is not a logic thing. i just hate oss being basically abused in that way

[timschmidt]

I think it's a mistake to see it as abuse. They are using the software under the terms it was licensed to them by the developers. So no abuse has happened. Doubtless they have made contributions to that software in the process as well.

Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And as consoles and PCs converge, there are fewer and fewer reasons for me to be upset about one manufacturer's choices. I voted with my dollars and bought a Steam Deck. I think the preservation of culture is a much stronger argument for breaking console DRM and emulation.

[prmoustache]

That is unrelated to the license. They are still free to download and install FreeBSD on any arch supported by the project.

[globular-toast]

The freedom of the master is not the least bit impacted by legalised slavery.

[cies]

> nothing more than an attack to our freedom

C'mon... It improves memory safety!

I agree with GPL being a way to protect the investment in the commons so it remains "freer" than with MIT/BSD licensed code. But in the cloud platform world this is has show to be not so helpful (hence we need the AGPL). Both GPL and AGPL are (AGPL more so) shunned by big biz: this is a blessing (fuck 'm) and a curse (they have much money to invest).

All open source releases are extending the commons (freely available to everyone), so if MIT/BSD code is released I still cheer for that (even if it clones GPL code).

[t-3]

I don't know why so many people think compelling code to be shared is practical, desirable, or better than leaving it up to choice, but GPL is definitely not more free than BSD license.

[account42]

Anyone who doesn't want to comply with the conditions of the GPL is simply a freeloader. Complaining that your freedoms are restricted because to take other's work you also need to share your own changes to it (and even that condition depends on you distributing the modified software) does not elicit sympathy with me.

[cies]

BSD is freer license (you can do more with the code, including releasing binaries based on the original source w/o releasing the source of the improvements), GPL is a license for freer code (you are not allowed to release binary derivatives w/o releasing the source of the improvements).

[largbae]

The GNU effort was driven by dissatisfaction with the license on the prior implementations, and was probably considered disrespectful by the copyright holders of those too...

[lelanthran]

> The GNU effort was driven by dissatisfaction with the license on the prior implementations, and was probably considered disrespectful by the copyright holders of those too...

A bit of a distinction, there.

The goal of the GNU effort was to empower users, hence the pro-user license.

The goal of the Rust coreutils cloning is to spread fast, hence the pro-corporate license.

Whether you prefer GPL or not, attempting to displace a pro-user tool with a pro-corporate tool is more than simply "disrespectful".

[timschmidt]

Nothing in permissive licenses prevents you from adding a useful feature and licensing the result under the GPL. If your fork is better for users, it'll catch on.

I really appreciate the permissive licensing in the Rust ecosystem as it greatly eases the task of writing code for pay. While the finished product may have a commercial license, I often find bits to improve in the permissively licensed parts and contribute them back upstream. Customers seem perfectly fine with this arrangement. Tough to do the same with the GPL - even LGPL'd libraries complicate contract terms and distribution a little by comparison.

With the huge productivity increase LLMs provide for writing code, it seems to me that we're rapidly entering an era in which libraries and tools for everything are available in every language, and under every license, which seems like a good thing. It is nice not to feel limited by one's language choice or work environment.

I did a fair amount of work on the RepRap project, which is mostly GPL'd, and that worked out OK, but there have definitely been opportunities lost over the last 15 years or so due to license constraints which more permissive licenses would have allowed. Finding a balance which helps developers put food on the table while writing open source code also seems like a good thing.

The GPL is great. I think there are important projects which really benefit from the strong incentive it provides to share. But there's definitely room for more than one way to do things.

Ultimately, Everything Is A Remix (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA)

[lelanthran]

The thing is, I don't really want to do a clause-by-clause, point/counterpoint "Chapter And Verse Citations" argument.[1]

It's why I focus on the goals - they're clear and well-understood.

And, to be clear, I was mostly on the fence about this (my open-source projects tend to be a mix of BSD/MIT and GPL) since around 1995. For my FLOSS experiments/projects, I'd pick a license based on the goal of the project: Popularity? Maybe BSD. Community? Definitely GPL.

I changed my mind recently (started about a year ago, completely changed about 2 months ago). It's become clear that corporations (not all, just enough) are simply scavenging of the effort of others.

Looking back over history, the BSDs were mined extensively by corporations, who then never gave back.

Compare with Linux, which was adopted extensively by corporations, and forced to give back.

The latter had more valuable progress, faster. The world got better stuff, not (for example) some Apple shareholders.

If the BSD-type licenses really did further progress in the field, we would have seen it by now. What we do see is massive progress, almost all based on Linux, funded by corporations themselves. We see new research and novel ideas coming to Linux first.

My outlook now is: Make your project GPL and keep it that way via copyright assignment using a CLA.

The argument along the lines of "Corporations are hesitant to use GPL stuff" doesn't make sense to me. If some corporate wants to close off their changes to your GPL project, then fine - they can pay you for a license to do that!

The counter-argument that "it's an additional barrier to track every little thing that you use from Open Source" is an argument I reject: that's the cost of doing business. Businesses can complain all they want that the charity they are getting is too costly to manage, but the fact is that it's still less costly than going without.

FWIW, I operate as a business. My code is now either closed source or GPL: no in-between.

[1] Such arguments devolve eventually into a wall of text that few read, and of the few that read, even fewer are convinced.

[timschmidt]

> Compare with Linux, which was adopted extensively by corporations, and forced to give back.

I don't think Linux's success has as much to do with license as it has to do with Linus Torvalds. Very few developers can work on one project for 30 years straight making respectable engineering decisions for the entire run. And even fewer delegate well. Both of which Linus seems to have managed. If anything, corporations seem to use Linux despite the GPL, because it has collected the best hardware support of any of the Free / Libre OS options.

> We see new research and novel ideas coming to Linux first.

Linux still has no great GPL'd answer to ZFS. Linux adopted the Berkley Packet Filter, which has become infrastructure for an ever increasing number of subsystems in the kernel. Linux's tracing infrastructure is finally about feature parity with Dtrace, though it's still not quite as easy to use. The list goes on. Certainly many great things have been pioneered in Linux as GPL'd code as well, which is great. Your view just seems to be a little biased.

I don't have any problem with your choices about how you license your code. Everyone gets to do what they want. I can only say that the folks I've worked with don't bat an eye at MIT or BSD or Apache licensed dependencies, but know to ask about the GPL and avoid. That's about the extent of it. In my experience they do not even consider licensing under different terms - probably because it's only possible with carefully curated code in which there's only ever been one contributor, or every contributor has signed a CLA allowing the lead developer to relicense.

> Looking back over history

I think one has to be careful about grand narratives. They often leave out crucial details while painting a version of things as we want them to have happened, as opposed to the messy haphazard way things tend to happen. Hindsight is 20:20, but rose colored glasses can still throw it off.

[globular-toast]

Linus himself has said licensing Linux under the GPL was one of the best things he did. He's great, but to achieve what Linux is today he'd need to have made himself a couple orders of magnitude bigger. Linus also acknowledges the "genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration" thing. And this coming from someone not renowned for being particularly humble.

The folks you've worked with are looking for something they can take without giving back. It's as simple as that really. Either that or they just don't like the GPL for entirely irrational reasons, which is all too common.

GPL is like "you can do whatever you like, except preventing others from doing what they like". Permissive zealots are like "boo! That's restrictive! I should be allowed to do anything I like!" Beats me why any thinking person would want a world like that.

[lelanthran]

> If anything, corporations seem to use Linux despite the GPL, because it has collected the best hardware support of any of the Free / Libre OS options.

Well, yes, that's my point: It didn't get the best hardware support by allowing vendors to close of every single driver.[1]

It's collected the best hardware support because those hardware manufacturers who write drivers contributed those drivers back to mainline, hence the reason for Linux's dominance over the competing FLOSS OSes.

Compare to the BSDs, who collected NO hardware support from Apple.

> I can only say that the folks I've worked with don't bat an eye at MIT or BSD or Apache licensed dependencies, but know to ask about the GPL and avoid.

Maybe they ask, and maybe they avoid. My experience with those (very rare) clients who avoid is that they want to take a 99.99% complete solution, add their 0.01% contribution, and lock the resulting product up.

> I think one has to be careful about grand narratives. They often leave out crucial details while painting a version of things as we want them to have happened, as opposed to the messy haphazard way things tend to happen. Hindsight is 20:20, but rose colored glasses can still throw it off.

I agree, but note that I did not come to this opinion quickly nor rashly. It was carefully considered, while taking into account the behaviour of corporations and communities over the history of my involvement as a professional developer (i.e. mid-90s).

IOW, this is not an opinion that I have held for 30 years, it's an opinion that I have formed after watching the industry for 29 years. It'd be quite hard to claim that my opinion is an uninformed or rose-tinted one.

[1] Nvidia shows that, with enough effort, vendors could have closed off the drivers anyway. But there's less friction in simply throwing the driver to the community and letting it get maintained, as opposed to writing shims and binary blobs which the vendor still has to maintain.

[globular-toast]

It was driven by the desire to ensure everyone in the world has access to free software. I've been fortunate enough to live my entire life in a world with free software, but I don't take it for granted. People who would replace the GPL with permissive licences do. All you have to do is observe the behaviour of corporations. Just a little bit. Just enough to see that at every step a corporation will take as much as they can and give back as little as they can. Free software would not last long with permissive licences.

[pjmlp]

GPL only took off, because Berkeley was rather busy with AT&T, and GNU was there for Linus to reach for.

It isn't only Rust, it is any language that favours static linking by default.

[DeathArrow]

I still wonder how an alternative world, where BSD won instead of Linux, would look like.

[happymellon]

We already have a fairly good idea based upon corporate actions today.

Look at Mac OS. That's what happens when freedoms don't have to be honoured. Corporations have spent a lot of effort trying to work around the GPL, whether it was via network services or something else.

If everyone had gone down the BSD route we would have been there, just a lot quicker. This is why I would never licence any of my work as anything other than GPL or AGPL (dual so that people can pay to avoid GPL, but they still contribute financially).

This is all a team effort to make the world a better place and BSD is too idealistic.

[colordrops]

It's arguable that macOS going Unix had a halo effect that did more for Linux and open source than if they stayed on a completely propietary stack. There is a ton of cross pollination between mac and Linux software, at least on the command line.

[lelanthran]

> It's arguable that macOS going Unix had a halo effect that did more for Linux and open source than if they stayed on a completely propietary stack.

But that's not relevant to the parent's point, which is "If all open source, such as Linux, was BSD licensed, then only proprietary unixes would be common", which I happen to agree with.

Linux would have been further behind because all the proprietary unixes could take the best parts, without giving back (like Apple did/does with BSD), and all those thousands of full-time employees working on Linux would have created value for the shareholders of their employers, not value for the Linux users (like they currently do now).

[DeathArrow]

>and all those thousands of full-time employees working on Linux would have created value for the shareholders of their employers, not value for the Linux users (like they currently do now)

But aren't the biggest Linux users companies? They use Linux for their data centers, for the mobile phones they sell.

[happymellon]

I don't know who would argue that.

There was a lot of Unix already, and Linux ate it's lunch by being a simple recompile away.

MacOS does a lot to try and hide that it's a Unix.

> There is a ton of cross pollination between mac and Linux software

Do we have any good examples, because Apple spends a lot of effort breaking cross platform compatibility?

> at least on the command line.

There is a lot of Linux command line software ported to MacOS, but I can't think of any good examples for the other way around.

[pjmlp]

Apple does a good job staying up to date with UNIX standards, it is the devs that live in GNU land that get surprised.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

[pjmlp]

Most likely it would be business as usual for all UNIXes, taking what they would feel like from BSD, as they were doing before during the whole AT&T vs BSD base model for UNIX architecture, like how Solaris evolved, or Windows used for its initial TCP/IP infrastructure (until Vista).

[colechristensen]

GNU coreutils is to a very large extent nearly exactly copied functionality from other unix distributions (unix system v, BSDs). It's not like GNU is getting ripped off here.

GNU coreutils is a clone, nobody's feelings should be hurt if somebody else makes another clone of the same functionality. (license zealots will have hurt feelings but for different reasons)

[dagw]

GNU coreutils is a clone

Coreutils may have started as a clone, but quickly became so much more. While the 'traditional' unix tools were pretty much frozen when it came to new features, GNU was experimenting and adding new features and trying to improve the UX (which not everybody approved of). There's a reason why the first thing many people would do on a new Unix install was to add GNU coreutils, and in fact many of the GNU features eventually made it back into the traditional tools.

So the real question is will uutils eventually reach a point where it is better/different enough that people will actively want to replace coreutils on their GNU systems, or will it remain 'just' a clone.

[eru]

For better or worse, Gnu added lots of functionality. It's far from a 'nearly exact copy'.

[lynx23]

You could say the same thing about LLVM/Clang. Apple and Google only cooperated on that because they really really dont want a restrictive licence like the GPL.

But then again, after a while, Clang is a nice alternative... Which makes me think: Why exactly are you indirectly lobbying for a monopoly? Just because there is a GNU version of something can not mean there shouldnt be any other version. It just can not mean that...

IOW, nobody should tell anyone else they shouldn't exist.

[CJefferson]

The problem with gcc wasn't the GPL, it was the FSF leadership, particularly Stallman.

There were things people wanted to do with a good C++ compiler, like output a high-quality parse tree (which is useful for all kinds of things), which would have been easy to add to gcc, but were explictly forbidden from being merged into gcc under any circumstances.

This was just in case some closed-source person used that parse tree for non-GPL purposes.

This is why the C++ LSP (language server protocol, used in various text editors) used by basically everyone is based on clang, and there still isn't a gcc-based one.

[LightFog]

GPL software needn’t have anything to do with GNU - having alternative projects is healthy for many reasons.

I just think that trying to make a permissive drop-in replacement for software that emphasises the very freedoms that have allowed the creation of the replacement in the first place is unfortunate and short-sighted. It’s a good thing that the authors have every right to do it all the same though.

[josephcsible]

I don't think there should be a monopoly, but I do wish the alternatives would be copyleft too.

[redundantly]

I wonder what the Venn diagram would like for people opposed to uutils and people that support systemd.

[IntelMiner]

This seems like a rather "baiting" response but I'll bite

I think systemd is a useful evolution in the problem of "Linux plumbing"

Even if it ends up being replaced by something else, for better or worse Lennart sat down and tried something. That's better than 99% of the systemd haters who sit and postulate on reddit and phoronix

Conversely replacing GPL tools with more permissively licensed ones just seems like the "time is a flat circle" idiom

We'll use our GPL'd systems to build BSD/MIT/Apache licensed ones where benevolent mega corporations "allow" our contributions. Until they don't

And then we'll begin the cycle all over again trying to liberate ourselves from corporate controlled software

[alexvitkov]

From https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html:

> If the version you've created is considerably more useful than the original, then it's worth copylefting your work, for all the same reasons we normally recommend copyleft.

Wouldn't you consider this advice disrespectful to the original authors as well? The FSF is directly telling you to take the existing project, not even your own re-implementation, and take over and GPL it.

[kosmozaut]

What's wrong with the MIT license?

[SpecialistK]

Nothing at all. Some people just prefer copyleft licenses and use hyperbole like "disrespectful" and "dangerous" to attack software with permissive licenses.