[steveklabnik]

MIT/Apache2 is the default in the Rust ecosystem, and so the authors selected it because they didn’t care that much, and so going with the community default makes sense.

In practice, even if they’d chosen the GPL for their own code, they’d be including dependencies that weren’t GPL’d, so unless they were committing to doing everything from scratch (including the Rust standard library!) some parts of the codebase would be non-GPL’d.

[em-bee]

so unless they were committing to doing everything from scratch (including the Rust standard library!) some parts of the codebase would be non-GPL’d.

that doesn't matter. the point of the GPL is to protect the application. that still happens even if libraries used are not GPL. the LGPL would not exist if that were an issue, so using a different more restrictive license for applications, and a less restrictive one for libraries is done intentionally.

[DaSHacka]

> MIT/Apache2 is the default in the Rust ecosystem, and so the authors selected it because they didn’t care that much, and so going with the community default makes sense.

This is exactly the issue most of us have with the rust ecosystem and these 'rewrite in rust' projects, though.

By making everything licensed with the absolute bottom wrung restrictions, you're just made it even easier for corpos to have free pickings of any given tool on the internet to incorporate into their own tools and have never-ending Amazon and Elasticsearch situations.

Obviously the community wouldn't even be here to begin with if it wasn't for Linux going with a GPLv2 license. Going forward, with everything becoming more MIT/BSD licensed, I wonder to see how the community/ecosystem will fare.

I suspect, should there come a time in the future where we realize that this may have been a critical error, it'll be far too late to correct it.

[steveklabnik]

I disagree but I understand your perspective, and that's fine. I mostly wanted to communicate "the choice of license was mostly out of needing to just pick one, it was not ideologically motivated."

[sureglymop]

I understand what you mean but wouldn't you say that in itself seems a bit careless considering the scope and context of this project?

But I get it, at least it doesn't have no license.

[steveklabnik]

I don't think it's careless because I think that for someone who does not really care about the ideology here other than "I want people to be able to use my code," I think that the MIT license or similar is actually the closest license to their intent.

I also don't think it's careless because "Go with community norms" is a considered way to choose something.

Finally, this isn't really about "careless" exactly, but if I were the authors of this project, I would deliberately choose MIT/Apache2.0 over the GPL, and so like, I dunno, suggesting that they're not being responsible because they didn't pick the GPL isn't a framing I'd agree with.

[hnlmorg]

> By making everything licensed with the absolute bottom wrung restrictions, you're just made it even easier for corpos to have free pickings of any given tool on the internet to incorporate into their own tools and have never-ending Amazon and Elasticsearch situations.

I've already given plenty of examples of BSD-licensed coreutils. If an evil corporation wanted to steal coreutils, they wouldn't need to take the Rust implementation. And as a bonus, if they took FreeBSD/OpenBSD/whatever, they'd get a project that's far more mature too.

It is, after all, exactly what Apple did with Darwin.

> Obviously the community wouldn't even be here to begin with if it wasn't for Linux going with a GPLv2 license.

That's survivor bias and doesn't fall in line with my experiences using Linux and BSD in the 90s.

BSD originally had a bigger community than Linux for quite a while. What accelerated Linux wasn't the license; it was the hacker culture.

BSD systems were tightly controlled ecosystems, whereas Linux was a free-for-all because the kernel was managed by a different developer to the guy who managed GNU. So everything about the GNU/Linux ecosystem was disparate projects slapped together. This encouraged others to slap their own parts to GNU/Linux. This is why fsck needed to exist: the file system was slapped together so Linux needed a way to fix file corruptions. It's why there's different package managers and why the concept of a "distribution" exists in the first place.

It's what made Linux approachable and it meant development on Linux happened at a much faster pace than on BSD.

Then all of those hackers got jobs. Became managers. And recommended Linux because it's what they learned "UNIX" on.

Linux was basically the original "move fast and break things". If it had been licensed MIT then nothing would have changed.

> I suspect, should there come a time in the future where we realize that this may have been a critical error, it'll be far too late to correct it.

The GPL vs BSD argument is probably older than you've been alive. It's probably older than a considerable number of HNers have been alive. And it's been proven time and time again that it's an ideological debate that has no practical truth. Hence why people stopped arguing it.

[coldtea]

>you're just made it even easier for corpos to have free pickings of any given tool on the internet to incorporate into their own tools

So? That's allowed, they should do whatever they want with that code. I've preferred most MIT/Apache stuff over GNU alternatives even for personal use.

>Obviously the community wouldn't even be here to begin with if it wasn't for Linux going with a GPLv2 license. Going forward, with everything becoming more MIT/BSD licensed, I wonder to see how the community/ecosystem will fare.

There are tons of projects with MIT/BSD/Apache and decades of community participation. Including *BSD and Apache server themselves...

Linux being GNU didn't help it becoming driven by big companies paying all the core developers...