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Ubuntu explores replacing gnu utils with rust based uutils (www.cyberciti.biz)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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At first I was sceptical, but after a few thought, I came to the solution that, if uutils can do the same stuff, is/stays actively maintained and more secure/safe (like memory bugs), this is a good change.

What are your thoughts abouth this?

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[–] [S] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What does the license change actually mean? What are the differences?

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  • [–] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    The best example I could point to would be BSD. Unlike Linux, the BSD kernel was BSD (essentially MIT) -licensed. This allowed Apple to take their code and build OSX and a multi-billion dollar company on top of it, giving sweet fuck all back the community they stole from.

    That's the moral argument: it enables thievery.

    The technical argument is one of practicality. MIT-licensed projects often lead to proprietary projects (see: Apple, Android, Chrome, etc) that use up all the oxygen in an ecosystem and allow one company to dominate where once we had the latitude to use better alternatives.

    • Step 1 is replacing coreutils with uutils.
    • Step 2 is Canonical, Google, or someone else stealing uutils to build a proprietary "fuutils" that boasts better speeds, features, or interoperation with $PROPRIETARY_PRODUCT, or maybe even a new proprietary kernel.
    • Step 3 is where inevitably uutils is abandoned and coreutils hasn't been updated in 10 years. Welcome to 1978, we're back to using UNIX.

    The GPL is the tool that got us here, and it makes these exploitative techbros furious that they can't just steal our shit for their personal profit. We gain nothing by helping them, but stand to lose a great deal.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The code can be taken and used in close source projects

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    And how does this hurt all of us who use it for open source projects?

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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Competitive improvements the company makes make be kept secret, re packaged, and sold without making contributions to the src code.

    Basically embrace, extend, extinguish

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  • [+] -10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Ideas can only be patented, not copyrighted. If a company designs something novel enough to qualify for a patent, and so good that people willingly pay for the feature, that's impressive, and arguably still a good thing. If instead they design a better user experience, or an improvement in performance, the ideas can be used in open source, even when the code cannot be.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago*

    Imagine a contributor of the project. He would have been fixing the bug for free and give the work to the public project. Right before he submits the code change, he sees an ad from a big tech bro: "Hiring. Whoever can fix this bug gets this job and a sweet bonus." He hesitated and worked for the company instead.

    Now that he is the employee of the company. He can't submit the same bug fix to the open source project because it is now company property. The company's product is bug free, and the open source counterpart remains buggy.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    means it can also be captured by a corpo takeover and taken private

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It can be forked by anyone, but what is already out there will always be there.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    To give you an example, if git was under the MIT license instead of GPL , then Microsoft can silently add incompatible features to GitHub without anyone knowing. The regular git client appears to work for a while. Then they start advertising msgit with some extra GitHub features and shortcuts. Once they get to 50% adoption they simply kill the open source version off.

    If GitHub required a special client to be installed tomorrow… I would have to concede and use it. It’s GPL that stops that because everyone has to get every new feature.

    When Slack was first rolling out the dev team in my office of 50 people we all hated it. Thankfully it had an IRC bridge so we could use Slack through IRC. It was seemingly the same experience as before except more business users were in the chat rooms. Once the Corp side of the business were onboard, they dropped IRC support, forcing us to use their clients.

    Now it doesn’t matter that rules or laws or privacy invasion they do. They have captured the companies communications and can hold it hostage.

    I’ve seen it again and again. When is the last time you downloaded an MP3 file?

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