Re:Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)
by mik1998 on Monday February 13, 2023 @07:47PM
(#34783509)
It makes no sense to make a dichotomy between permissively licensed software and proprietary software when any MIT-licensed software can be trivially repurposed as proprietary software, which is in fact standard practice in many fields (i.e. web, anti-personal computers).
Re:Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)
by est31 on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @05:26PM
(#34797082)
You can also repurpose MIT licensed software as GPL licensed.
Re:Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)
by phkahler on Monday February 13, 2023 @07:55PM
(#34783594)
>> Meaning, if there is GNU coreutils around but no liberally licensed alternative, there will be a market for alternatives that proprietary vendors can use. Thus, somewhere out there will maintain a proprietary coreutils library and charge money for it.
And where is that?
Re:Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)
by TylerE on Monday February 13, 2023 @08:06PM
(#34783694)
BSD user land?
Re:Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)
by peoplefromibiza on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @03:42AM
(#34786955)
quoting Thus, somewhere out there will maintain a proprietary coreutils library and charge money for it
BSD is not proprietary
Re:Reimplementing the Coreutils in a modern language (Rust)
by est31 on Monday February 13, 2023 @08:49PM
(#34784047)
I think people who deeply care about avoiding GPL use BSDs instead, so they swap out the entire OS (say some console vendor). As for coreutils, they aren't that important that one has to use them in particular. There are plenty of devices using Busybox, which uses GPL as well but one that is less offensive to many companies. I'm not sure what Android is doing, it might not have executables by default?
Coreutils might not be important enough for people to pay for its maintenance, as is seen by people leaving the proprietary unixes. Idk. That sentence was mostly there to explain my more general argument.
Copyleft is very nice but I think the competition that liberally licensed software means to proprietary alternatives is way higher than the competition that liberally licensed software means to copylefted software. Meaning, if there is GNU coreutils around but no liberally licensed alternative, there will be a market for alternatives that proprietary vendors can use. Thus, somewhere out there will maintain a proprietary coreutils library and charge money for it. This code base will always exist as a risk to the GPL licensed coreutils package. If there is a free (as in money) alternative however, the proprietary vendor will have a much harder time to convince some company to buy their product.
I think copyleft shines the most when there is a lot of competition with proprietary solutions. Without copyleft, the competing solutions could just incorporate improvements of some package into their own. With copyleft, the copylefted software package has a chance to fight. But in a domain where Free Software has won, and I would consider coreutils to be such an environment, one can also have open source software.