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The things people do to sabotage free software
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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there's only one person here being butthurt about this whole situation and trying to be confrontational and it ain't me.
coreutils has lots of stuff in it, there's going to be trivial stuff in it as well, which has to be programmed if one wants to make a full rewrite. I don't get what the big deal is. how is that sabotaging free software in any way?
You're still doing it ...
It's one thing to treat open source like a giveaway and an other to treat it like infrastructure. If that difference doesn't matter to you then there's probably no reason to continue this conversation, but since you asked:
The main downside of the MIT license compared to the GPL is that it doesn't guarantee that derivative works remain open-source. This exposes code to a few key risks:
The GPL's "copyleft" policy is specifically designed to prevent these issues by ensuring that modified versions distributed to others must remain open source.
The good news is that code under MIT can be re-licensed as GPL by the copyright holder, but not the other way around. Unfortunately that sort of change probably won't sit too well with uutil's funding agreements.
If I were to depend on this project, 5 years from now, I’d rather not wake up to find the core contributors sold or yielded to a closed-source vendor.
Notice, I didn't once go after anybody with personal attacks over this. You couldn't seem to stop yourself.
If you think I have any interest in personal squabbles over 8 lines of code, I don't.
That meme at the start was directed at your argument, not you in particular; those are not the same thing. I apologise if it came across as personal to you, but it wasn't meant to be. Notice how I immediately went to discuss the actual topic with no further "personal attacks" until you decided to get pissy with your next comment. Had you just shrugged and actually wrote your counterpoint instead, that would've been the end of it. You didn't. Just... you know, if you wanna go around being snarky on the internet, be prepared to receive some snark back as well.
With that said, I think the argument about uutils' license is a much more sound one. As a matter of fact I expressed the same concern a over year ago, albeit in a much less elaborate fashion: https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/23171431/13400085 (Which of course I didn't expect you to dig up because that'd be absurd)
I'm not a big fan of uutils, believe it or not. It's not nearly as stable as they tout it to be, they broke
cprecently as an example, and it's is generally not a step in the right direction IMO. Still, the fact that uutils may be ill conceived doesn't invalidate the fact that relying on public, official, C APIs is perfectly reasonable. Both can be true.Had this post been about the license instead of "oh look the hypocrites use C APIs in the end" as if there was any alternative, we wouldn't be having this conversation.