As far as I understand, this initiative is primarily about reducing hardcoded dependencies on Busybox. As such, this is indeed what would enable alternative implementations to exist cleanly alongside whatever is the default.

Because yeah, trying to change Alpine's init system, mdev, or other coreutils is indeed not easy/feasible at the moment.

You can already install coreutils and udev over busybox, without busybox being removed.

And if you look under the hood, you will see that it's only possible because of a bunch of ad-hoc hacks, which is exactly what my proposal was about: level the playing field and make it possible to have alternatives _without_ the ad-hoc hacks.

Are you referring to the busybox symlink farm?

Not at all. I'm referring to the structure of the Alpine packaging, especially around boot scripts, that hardcodes busybox in a number of places and makes it difficult to package an alternative without workarounds - which accumulates tech debt.

One of the reasons people use alpine is to get away from GNU cruft.

The simplicity of Alpine and the lack of systemd is what drew me to it. I have converted all my routers, firewalls, VM's and home appliances to Alpine. I do not have a single regret.

Sure, I like having a distro that defaults to not using GNU (if nothing else, to flavor the GNU/Linux naming debate), but there's nothing wrong with allowing GNU or others to be used. Further, Alpine already packages GNU tools, so I prefer the most elegant implementation possible.

If that's indeed the case, I think it might be because of the fear of license trouble ie the whole business of Docker images referencing/installing a Debian base as the first thing always had the smell of a GPL circumvention device to me, in part at least. But it seems license holders don't really bother, or we've heard about it by now. And in that context, Alpine already got rid of the OS and glib, leaving only the rest of the userland GPLish. OTOH busybox is GPL, too, and actually known for going after violators, so what do I know.

Its not the licence shit that bothers me, its the absolute garbage state of GNU maintained code.