News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilities in Rust. Parent comment

Re:Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilitie... by KZerda on Monday December 06, 2021 @02:47AM (#29457248)
I'd argue the opposite. xGPL makes it easier for the founding company to just run away with it. We saw it with MongoDB, where it being AGPL means one company can control and unilaterally relicense it. Other examples I'd see of being GPLed doing little to nothing to prevent such shenanigans are any Oracle owned GPLed properties -- Java, MySQL, and VirtualBox all have user-hostile projects and misfeatures added even with the GPL. Conversely, permissive Free projects like LLVM and Postgres have had a lot harder time with one company controlling, because its non-copyleft nature means that everyone has a fair footing in controlling the direction.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilitie... by bayindirh on Monday December 06, 2021 @03:06AM (#29457351)
The problem is not xGPL, it's the copyright transfer. If you don't force copyright transfer on the patches you accept, you can't relicense a code overnight.

All "xGPL to shenanigans" incidents have underlying copyright transfer problems. Recently, an emulator had gone the same way. They asked for copyright transfer to be able to relicense from GPL, and some folks here have used derogatory adjectives for people who didn't want to transfer their copyrights.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilitie... by goohle on Monday December 06, 2021 @11:22AM (#29461645)
Java -> OpenJDK

MySQL -> MariaDB

OpenOffice -> LibreOffice

Chrome -> Chromium

VSCode -> VSCodium

and so on.

GPL protects my rights.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Uutils: an attempt at writing cross-platform CLI utilitie... by pjmlp on Monday December 06, 2021 @04:20AM (#29457760)
Ah that is why clang in now loosing the race to being C++20, while two of its major founders are more than happy with C++17 for their OS stacks and main languages on those stacks.

So where are the others stepping in to fill the void reaching C++20 compliance and catching up to GCC and VC++?

[ Parent | on HN ]