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”
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.
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.
Freedom for the rich and powerful to fuck over society and everyone else!
“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.
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
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
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.
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.
fyi: GNU coreutils are licensed GPL, not AGPL.
there is so much other confusion in this thread, i can’t even 🤦
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.
This can happen.
The flip side is noone uses it. I’ve never worked at any company that allowed even lgpl code to be used. If it has a commercial license we’ll buy it, if not…find another tool.
Lawyers are terrified of gpl and will do anything to avoid going to court over it, including forcing you to rip code out and do a clean room rewrite.
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
I worked on an oss library with an MIT license and my colleagues told me they with that instead of GPL was with GPL it basically forces anyone who uses the library to make everything in their project available.
Only if they make changes/improvements to the code. If it’s a library that is used then no, AFAIK you don’t need to. If everyone using GPL code had to make their entire project FOSS then TPLink and DLink wouldn’t have any market share. The only reason OpenWRT exists is because Linksys was forced to open up their code because they had illegally refrained from opensourcing their code, which was a great positive for the community
If you are using a GPL library that is statically linked to code with a different license the result is one binary that has inside both GPL and other license code, which would not be allowed under the GPL terms, because it requires that the binaries that use the source code must have their source code available in full (including other source and modifications that are part of the same binary).
The only case in which you don’t need to provide the source for GPL software is if you don’t actually distribute the binary to customers… private binaries do not have to be published with their source, as long as you never made the binaries public and never gave it to anyone else. Only when you give it to someone you need to provide the code.
This allows for a loophole in which if you are providing a service, then you can run the software privately in your private server without sharing the source code to the clients using the service, since they do not really run the server program although they indirectly benefit from its results. This is why the AGPL was created, since it has a clause to force also those offering services to make the source of the server available to the users of the service.
I don’t mind if people use LGPL or some derivative of GPL. All I want is improvements to the source be published, and MIT simply doesn’t enforce that. I have no intention to force companies to publish their code that they have worked on for a long time - doing that never really helps. But I do want them to publish changes they make to already FOSS products so the author and the community can benefit.
Yes, but the loophole I was mentioning allows companies to not release the code even when it’s GPL, that’s why I was mentioning the AGPL (which is different from the LGPL).
Maybe there could be another reason why people choose MIT to begin with:
When you start a new repo on github it makes suggestions which license to use, and I bet many people can’t be arsed to think about it and just accept what they’re offered. [My memory is a little patchy since I very rarely use github anymore, but I definitely remember something like this.] And maybe github tends to suggest MIT.
That said, please undestand that many, many git platforms exist and there is no reason at all to choose one of the two that actually have the word git in them.
I can’t believe professional developers choose MIT because they can’t be arsed to look at the license choices
Ah, OK. No, of course not. I was thinking more about hobby developers.
But somebody else already pointed it out: MIT makes a project more attractive for investors. Follow the $£€
I think many hobby developers also see “hobby” developing as part of their career, so they would happily try and have their hobby align with future employment possibilities. Since companies avoid GPL, those devs will rather choose a license that is more attractive to those potential employers when they see their portfolio.
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
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.
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
