this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Do large tech companies contribute a lot to the GPL coreutils?
Yes, they do. The GPL's copyleft clause requires companies to release the source code of any modifications they distribute, ensuring contributions back to the community. The MIT license, however, allows proprietary forks without this obligation. In other terms, the MIT license is effectively permitting companies to "jump out" of the open-source ecosystem they make use of.
I know, but do they? Has big tech contributed to the code base significantly for coreutils specifically? sed and awk or ls has been the same as long as I remember, utf8 support has been added, but I doubt apple or google was behind that.
As far as I’m aware, contributions from major corporations to GNU Core Utilities specifically (e.g. sed, awk, ls) have been limited. Most development has historically come from the GNU community and individual contributors. For example, UTF-8 support was likely added through community efforts rather than corporate involvement. However, as these corporations increasingly back projects moving away from GNU and the GPL, their intent to leverage the permissive nature of the MIT license becomes evident. Should 'uutils' gain widespread adoption, it would inevitably lead to a significant shift in governance.
Intel does a lot, by which I mean they sponsor people to do it. Changing user facing utils is a bad idea as it breaks things. Although I don’t really keep up with it I know they’ve been changing things like the number of levels of pages etc, over time moving to sysd instead of init and stuff but the latter was a decade ago now. You can probably trace the maintainer to who sponsors them from here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_version_history
Kernel yes, but coreutils? It's ls, sleep, who, pwd, and so on.