I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don’t see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It’s like they’re painting their faces with “here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine”
The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire “libertarians” who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or “apolitical” tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.
To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.
it’s interesting how the move away from the gpl is never explicitly justified as a license issue: instead, people always have some plausible technical motivation. with clang/llvm it was the lower compile times and better error messages; with these coreutils it’s “rust therefore safer”. the license change was never even addressed
i believe they have to do this exactly bc permissive licenses appeal to libertarian/apolitical types who see themselves as purely rational and changing a piece of software bc of the license would sound too… ideological…
so the people in charge of these changes always have a plausible technical explanation at hand to mask away the political aspect of the change
The rust coreutils project choosing the MIT license is just another gambit to allow something like android or chromeos happen to gnu+linux, where all of the userland gets replaced by proprietary junk.
And yet that’s a popularly welcomed approach, for some reason. Just look at the number of thumbs down this has. https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/1781
yeah, unfortunately most people in the foss community are the apolitical/free thinker types who hate the fsf bc it is “too political/evangelist” and don’t want to understand how user freedom is affected by permissive licenses
I"m with you on copyleft, but if I had any connection to the project and felt the need to add a reaction emoji, it’d probably be a “thumbs-down” as well.
It’s not because I’m against the GPL, but because of the way the GitHub comment is written.
It doesn’t even say “you should use the GPL”, it says “you MUST say GNU doesn’t agree with you”. I’m perplexed.
Now, I respect the idea of GNU, but the way GNUers in general go about behaving themselves is perfect to alienate people, and this GitHub issue is a prime example. I don’t get it.
If people don’t know about GNU, tell them. Nicely.
If people have misconceptions about GNU, there’s nothing wrong with fixing them. Again, nicely.
The problem is, whenever I encounter GNU and however much I agree with them on key issues (which is at about 90%, my main gripe with them being Freedom 0), they just have a knack to get me, someone who is with them on most issues, annoyed at them. I can clearly see how someone who isn’t as alligned with them as I am gets equally annoyed and avoids GPL and GNU like the plague just to fuck with 'em (while fucking over everyone, including themselves). Not to mention ones into the libertarian stream, since you yourself covered that pretty well.
What the GitHub issue you linked that I keep coming back to shows is this GNU herd mentality of fucking over others unintentionally and in turn fucking over everyone. While they’re clearly better than the “libtards”, they still end up doing the same mistake.
There is another issue on their tracker that was opened many years ago about relicensing to GPL, but it kind of became one of those things where a bunch of people came in and discussed it back and forth to death with no resolution.
I remember the lead developer of the Rust version of Coreutils gave a talk about the project once and he addressed the licensing question by essentially saying (paraphrasing), “I don’t care about this. So I just picked one.” You’d think someone so involved with open source as that guy (seriously, he has a hugely impressive pedigree) would care, or would at least give a justification.
It doesn’t even say “you should use the GPL”
That sounds a lot more confrontational and less diplomatic.
The ticket was actually indirectly asking it, by explaining the potential problems with non-copyleft. They just added “If you plan to carry on…” to introduce a compromise, which actually allowed for at least some minor change to be made, and made it clear that the different license is intentional and not just for lack of awareness (which would imply the devs have no intention on switching).
it says “you MUST say GNU doesn’t agree with you”
Somehow you added the “MUST” to this sentence, but not to the first one… even though the github issue did not say they MUST, instead it even used the word “please” and appealed to having some deference to the GNU coreutils.
At least this issue managed to get a change through for clarity… I don’t think you would have gotten anything at all with the other approach.
deleted by creator
I use LLVM because it’s good, but I would like it even more if it was GPL and I agree with OP’s comment as well.
However, you’re literally the guy that replies “oh, so you hate oranges” to people that say “I like apples” or however that meme goes. How about you don’t completely twist people’s justifications into something they never said.
edit: It comes down to that I have no say in whether other people want to allow their code to be exploited by corporations nor does it make a practical difference to me in what I can do with it, all I can do is say “you’re an idiot” to them.
chill, man. i’ve never said this is consciously (or at all) his reasoning for not choosing the gpl. what i mean is that, collectively, this is what’s pushing the development, sponsoring, and adoption of more and more tooling with permissive licenses
Add to this, the constant badmouthing of GNU and FSF from the crony bootlickers and sadly this is what we get
The tech crowd is also more of a consumer kind these days than the hacky kind, so it’s much easier to push corporate shite with a little bit of polish on top
Freedom for the rich and powerful to fuck over society and everyone else!
Yeah, that’s all there’s to it, along with pure ignorance. In a past not so ideologically developed life, I’ve written code under Apache 2 because it was “more free.” Understanding licenses, their implications, the ideologies behind them and their socioeconomic effects isn’t trivial. People certainly aren’t born educated in those, and often they reach for the code editor before that.
“apolitical” tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.
This, I understand.
laissez-faire “libertarians” who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL
This, I do not. Apologies for my tone in the next paragraph but I’m really pissed off (not directed at you):
WHAT RESTRICTIONS??? IF YOU LOT HAD EVEN A SHRED OF SYMPATHY FOR THE COMMUNITY YOU WOULD HAVE BOYCOTTED THE MIT AND APACHE LICENSE BY NOW. THIS IS EQUIVALENT TO HANDING CORPORATIONS YOUR WORK AND BEGGING THEM TO SCREW OVER YOUR WORK AND THE FOSS COMMUNITY.
I feel a bit better but not by much. This makes me vomit.
I write code for a living. I cannot, by any means, utilize a GPL library to support the needs of our customers and will either have to write my own replacement or dig to find something with less restrictions like MIT.
On many occasions, we will find bugs or usage gaps or slowdowns that can get pushed back to the MIT licensed open source cause we were able to use it in the first place. If your goal is to make sure your library gets used and gets external contributors, I don’t see how GPL helps the situation as it limits what developers can even choose your library in the first place. If your goal is spreading the ideology that all software should be free, go keep banging your drum for GPL.
Thank you for your work. If people like you were all around us, then I wouldn’t mind as much projects using MIT since we would still see contributions. But I doubt there’s that many people out there like you. Thank you for contributing to FOSS.
Like 80% of the top 10 most contributed libraries on github are either MIT, Apache, or BSD. I think you underestimate how many corpo folks do contribute or wholly support open source libraries.
I work in a company that deals with both commercial and government (military) software. The government is becoming more and more fixated on the software supply chain, or sw dependencies so to speak.
Existing dependencies are largely getting a pass for now, but with each new one I need to give a justification for. This includes the license of that software. I can’t use GPL at work.
it’s been a trend for a while unfortunately. getting rid of the gpl is the motivation behind e.g. companies sponsoring clang/llvm so hard right now. there are also the developers that think permissive licenses are “freer” bc freedom is doing whatever you want /s. they’re ideologically motivated to ditch the gpl so they’ll support the change even if there’s no benefit for them, financial or otherwise.
They are maliciously harming the community. They need to be named and shamed. I still seethe at OpenBSD using it. Why is it so hard for them to understand? Why do they want to give away their work for the taking to corporations who just want to make money off of their backs?
they have a different view on what freedom means
Then it’s not one that is actively helping the FOSS community
Here’s a fun idea, let’s fork these MIT-based projects and licence them under the AGPL :-)
If I could code at the level that these people do, I definitely would. If I ever publish anything that I’ve written for myself it will never be MIT/BSD licensed
fyi: GNU coreutils are licensed GPL, not AGPL.
there is so much other confusion in this thread, i can’t even 🤦
Its simple: its to exploit it in a corporate setting. I license under MIT because a lot of my things are of small convenience, but never without debating the ethics of why I am licensing it.
GNU is the enemy to capitalism and if you need more proof, look at what Apple has done with LLVM/Clang and CUPS. We need GNU more than ever.
I understand that if your boss tells you to write MIT/Proprietary code, you do so. I just wish that the ones who had a choice would use GPL
The author explicitly states that this is not the reason.
https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/discussions/4358#discussioncomment-8027681
Honestly it’s probably just because so many devs are involved more in their code and don’t want to worry about the nuances and headaches involved in licensing. MIT is still open source.
I guess I can’t really fault that. Developers not interested in the license they use to publish code baffles me
For me, my personal projects are generally MIT licensed. I generally don’t like “restrictions” on licenses, even if those “restrictions” are requiring others to provide their source and I want as many people to use my projects as possible, I don’t like to restrict who uses it, even if it’s just small/home businesses who don’t want to publish the updated source code. Although, I admit, I’m not a huge fan of large corporations potentially using my code to generate a profit and do evil things with it, but I also think that’s not going to be very common versus the amount of use others could get from it by having it using MIT who might not be able to use it otherwise with AGPL.
With that said, though, I have been starting to come around more to AGPL these days.
I wohld agree, because you really downplay the scenario.
As soon as you accidentallt create something, which everyone starts to use or has an use case, then some Cooperation will copy that thing, make it better and make your community dissappear because there is the newer tool which you cant change the code of anymore and need to use a monthly subscription or something to even use.
So, it somehow seems like you’re gaslighting yourself by downplaying the use case.
Mostly it will be small buisnesses and hobbyists, which I would like to code for them too. Especially when they are nice and friendly. But as soon as Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon gets hands on it and sees a potential to squeeze money through it by destroying it, then they will surely do it.
I edited my comment to better and more fully reflect my thoughts. It’s hard to properly express myself when I’ve been as sick as I have been with bronchitis and possible pneumonia for the past 4 weeks.
Hopefully my comment now better reflects my thoughts.
Had bronchitis as a child nearly every few weeks for years. All gone but sucks to have it.
Get well soon.
I still feel like, the point where you say more people can use it and will use it, can create a dark pattern.
Imagine you create something and make people depending on it. Another cooperation copies it and advances it with a lot of money. Somehow, the ecosystem is so changed, that when you depend on that project, you need to use the newer version of the cooperation and soon they will paywall it heavily.
Then, your wish for people using the code as much as possible got nuked.
I assume that many scenarios will allow the usage of your old MIT project without relying on the new version of someone. But rare cases exist, where this happens. Its like predicting the 30th step in chess or smth. (Idk chess that well)
Its… unlikely that it will happen, but yeah. I can understand your perspective, but slowly going to AGPL sounds right.
Bruh instead of all this speculation, you guys could have just looked it up.
https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/discussions/4358#discussioncomment-8027681
There is a big difference between what someone says they are doing vs why they are actually doing it
Well the dev said that he does not care about the license. He wanted to create a coreutils alternative with better concurency using Rust as a pet project. He had even stated that he was not interested in the MIT vs GPL drama, yet people here were acting like children over it.
People think it’s some kind of Canonical evil master plan, yet it’s just some random dude slapping a license on his cool new code, without really thinking about it. Also this conspiracy does not make sense at so many levels. For one Canonical would shoot themselves into their foot if they created their own proprietary coreutils, because admins would not want to deal with non-portable scripts. Also there are already the BSD utils, so if they wanted to create their own fork, they would have already done that by now. They won’t because they prefer free labor from FOSS devs.
If you’re developing software for a platform that doesn’t allow users to replace dynamic libraries (game consoles, iOS, many embedded/commercial systems), you won’t be able to legally use any GPL or AGPL libraries.
While I strongly agree with the motives behind copyleft licenses, I personally never use them because I’ve had many occasions where I was unable to use any available library for a specific task because they all had incompatible licenses.
I release code for the sole purpose of allowing others to use it. I don’t want to impose any restrictions on my fellow developers, because I understand the struggle it can bring.
Even for desktop programs, I prefer MIT or BSD because it allows others to take snippets of code without needing to re-license anything.
Yes I understand that means anyone can make a closed-source fork, but that doesn’t bother me.
If I wanted to sell it I might care, but I would have used a different license for a commercial project anyway.Sorry, I’m not much of a software dev so bear with me:
If the libraries are GPL licensed, is there a problem? Unless you’re editing the libraries themselves.
Now if the application is GPL licensed and you’re adding functionality to use other libraries, please push upstream. It helps the community and the author will more likely than not be happy to receive it
Using a GPL library will require you to re-license your entire project as GPL, regardless of whether you made a change or not.
LGPL is a bit better, because it allows you to dynamically link the library. But you’re required to provide a copy of source for the library, and any users must be able to swap the built library with their own copy.
Eg; you can use an AGPL-licensed .dll in your closed-source windows program, because users can swap that .dll easily.
You can’t do the same for a ps5 game because users aren’t able to replace any files that the game uses.
If the only problem is that you can’t use dynamic linking (or otherwise make relinking possible), you still can legally use LGPL libraries. As long as you license the project using that library as GPL or LGPL as well.
However, those platforms tend to be a problem for GPL in other ways. GPL has long been known to conflict with Apple’s App Store and similar services, for example, because the GPL forbids imposing extra limits that restrict user freedom and those stores have a terms of service that does exactly that.
I guess I forgot to mention that those platforms usually require you to sign NDA’s that prevent you from releasing any code that references their SDK.
This makes it impossible to license your entire project as GPL/AGPL, as you would be breaking the NDA.
Canonical still licenses most of their stuff under GPL3, including new stuff. The license (other than it being open) was probably not even a consideration in deciding to experiment with uutils.
MIT/GPL is fine for smaller tools.
For small programs the FSF/GNU even suggests considering not using the GPL https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html
Yes, and a cp or ls clone isn’t that meaningful to stick GPL to.
Speaking for myself, it’s because future monetization can be easier under mit when using a foss utility and private code.
My project would not exist at all unless there were ways to make money off it.
True, others can also use that same code too, in the exact same way, but that requires quite the investment, and those of us that are doing this are banking on not getting the interest of a monopoly in that way. We are competing against other small businesses who have limited resources.
At the same time the free part can get a boost by the community.
I comment a lot in politics here, and am sometimes an ass, so cannot name this project
not sure how it would be more difficult to make money using gpl tools
For our use case, this makes the most sense.
I’m not at all sure about the larger trend you noticed, but I know a non trivial number are doing it for the same reasons
Could you elaborate on those reasons, please? I’m not sure what you mean.
The mit license allows a mix of public and commercial code run by the same company, with minimal legal issues. One can use other tactics I am sure, but this one seems good when the commercial code absolutely needs the public code .
I think some confusion here can be resolved by stating this is anti foss, taking advantage of foss, it is capitalism taking advantage of having a good code base while making sure any contribution from outside the company is minimized. At the same time it gives my company absolute control over the private part.
Usually get into arguments here! I’m not defending it, but am saying open source would be less without.
I understand this may not be exactly how you meant your comment, but I think it’s important to clarify that free/libre software can also be commercial software, and in fact must allow commercial use in order to fit the Free Software Definition. It is probably easier to make lots of money with non-freely licensed software but I think contrasting “public” code with “commercial” code muddies the terminological waters a bit.
I assume this is in reference to the rust coreutils being MIT-licensed. How would using GPL benefit them?
Improvements would be upstreamed. Not with MIT
GPL would not require that. It would only require publication of the source. There is no requirement to give back or even make your changes compatible with upstream.
Yes, publication of the source is enough. However, you are correct and I should have worded it better. In practice, publishing the source allows the developers of the software to make improvements unhindered by licensing and other IP-based hindrances which are otherwise present in closed-source software
True.
Though, you are probably going to have a much easier time implementing a change to your code that is present in a company’s published code, than you would trying to reverse-engineer a binary.
Sharing of the code I would consider “giving back” in it of itself.
Does anyone use MPL anymore? Is it a decent middle ground or the worst of both worlds?
I like BSDs more than GPL just personal choice
Squeek, squack. Your opinion is whack
lol grow up
Sorry, but I or rather many hate your Opinion.
Its ok if you dislike my Opinion about that. But I will show you, that many dislike your Opinion with a little fun and humour.
I believe that this has nothing to do with growing up, but I think thats your opinion you can attempt to follow.
Lol even GNU and fsf failed at implementing gplv3 at all levels in Linux. And with gplv3 redhat gets awa with what they do. Also see recent agplv3 lawsuit. Gpl enforcement is real issue. If fsf wants why no create true copy left strong license no exceptions!
