[dalias]

At the time the project was started, Ulrich Drepper was the maintainer of glibc and the official response to any bug report was "STFU". So, no.

Aside from that, while a more permissive license was not part of my original goal or vision for musl, it's something that could never have happened by working on improving glibc. Right now we're facing a situation where Linux has been fragmented into a "GNU/Linux" minority made up of hackers' desktop PCs and enterprise servers, and an overwhelming Android majority. The latter is using a grotesquely incompatible, poorly designed, non-standards-conforming libc called Bionic, and if you want to run existing C programs on Android, you have to add heaps of #ifdef hackery to them to make them compatible with Bionic (much like the #ifdef hackery needed to make C programs work on Windows).

musl can provide a real, standards-conforming libc for use on Android that's still light and MIT-licensed (important because Open Handset Alliance members have a contractual obligation to Google not to add copyleft code to the system they distribute). This means, in theory, we can do away with the whole #ifdef mess and just run existing, portable software on Android. In short, it has the potential to free FOSS projects from getting bogged down in the maintenance burden of supporting yet another gratuitously-incompatible system (Android) in order to remain relevant.

[shaurz]

I would really like Android to switch over to Musl and drop Bionic, and eventually also drop SurfaceFlinger for Wayland and use an upstream kernel. I can dream...