Rust 👍
MIT instead of GPL 👎Precisely. The Rust community should stop using pushover licenses.
Eh, I don’t see the issue here. The MIT license is fine for a few reasons:
- attractive to lots of FOSS projects, like BSDs, Redox, etc
- no incentive to embed into proprietary projects - ls, cp, etc aren’t particularly interesting to embed, and functionality is usually better in the stdlib of whatever language you’re using
- increases appeal generally for research purposes
I really don’t see much benefit of GPL here. It makes sense for larger works with interesting snippets of code, but not for small, one-off tools like this.
If the other projects are licensed with a GPL, there is no issue doing any of these things (except using them for proprietary purposes later), which is the point. If you licensed your project incorrectly, that isn’t the GPL-licensed project’s fault.
If you licensed your project incorrectly
If you think other people disagreeing with you on how to license their own work is “incorrect” maybe you are the one not really in favor of freedom.
GPL is more freedom for users and developers. MIT is less freedom for users because it grants more “freedom” for some company to exploit the developer’s labor by taking it to make something proprietary with it.
If you want to use GPL code, pushover licenses are incorrect because they protect the user and developer from this nonsense.
Right, because the GPL is viral, forcing everything to be GPL-compatible or you’ll have problems. Some FOSS licenses aren’t GPL-compatible, notably the CDDL used for OpenZFS, which is why it has been a part of FreeBSD but not Linux (and it’s available now outside the kernel).
The GPL makes more sense the more “application-y” your project is, but if you want it used more broadly, more permissive licenses make more sense. Yes, the LGPL exists, but there are still a ton of caveats to it.
The code in something like coreutils isn’t all that useful generally, so protecting it with the GPL doesn’t bring a ton of value, whereas a more permissive license could.
I like the GPL and its variants and I use it from time to time. I also like the MIT and similar permissive licenses, and I use them as well. Use the right license for the use case. I think the MIT is fine here.
Debian should fork it and re-license it under the GPL.
What would be the point of doing that when they can just keep using GNU coreutils?
Well presumably there are at least some performance and safety benefits to using these new alternatives. Otherwise it’s just a blatant license dodge.
