[saurik]

> Why the MIT License?

> For consistency purposes. We're not interested in a license debate and will continue to use the MIT license, as we did with [our] Coreutils.

Putting this much good effort into building a strong implementation of the core Unix utilities under a permissive license is frankly kind of a shitty thing to do and is part of the reason why there is such a philosophical barrier to getting this kind of work fully upstreamed: the goal of the original coreutils wasn't merely to have high-quality portable Unix utilities, it was to ensure we'd always have them, as they belonged to the community in a way that permissively licensed code can never be... and, further, they've provided an incentive for operating systems that might otherwise end up as a locked/proprietary system to be forced open (an effect that would have been even stronger if only anyone had predicted the need for GPL3 back decades earlier), lest they have to put up with the less fully-featured BSD tooling. In a very real sense, the license is not even just a feature of the tooling: it was its defining feature, and it should be worth considering as part of "bug-for-bug compatibility".