159
Ubuntu 25.10's Move To Rust Coreutils Is Causing Major Breakage For Some Executables
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
159 points (99.4% liked)
Linux
58560 readers
923 users here now
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.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why does it matter to you? If the developers are fine with the license and how the code they write can be used under it, that's their prerogative. You don't lose anything if some company also uses those programs.
What are you expecting them to say? "That's the license we chose for this thing we're allowing you to use for free. Use it or don't, we don't care"? They have no obligation to justify themselves to you.
What do you mean by support? Would be be donating money to the developers if the license was different? The developers don't get anything from you using their code.
I understand the sentiment.
The move to a permissive license opens the door for these tools to possibly become closed source one day.
Why is that a problem if the developers are apparently fine with it?
Everyone can still use the open source version/fork. It could only become a problem if distributions for some reason decided to use that closed source version, which doesn't make any sense.
I fail to see a worst case scenario here beyond companies being able to profit from the software as well.
You know that you can change license of software that you own copyright to? You can take GPL code and change it to something else, but you can’t un-GPL existing released code. It’s the same thing with MIT.
The only people bound by the license are people who use it because it is licensed to them.
The difference is that organisation may develop MIT software without publishing their code.
That's a bit short-sighted. On the level of the individual project you are right, it's the dev's choice. And I think permissive licenses also have a place with security critical software like crypto libraries, where everyone benefits from secure libraries being used as much as possible, even in proprietary software.
But on an ecosystem level, this trend to permissive licensing is very worrying, because if it reaches a critical mass, it opens us up to EEE scenarios. Android is already bad enough, only made bearable by Google having to release much of the source code. Imagine what it would be like today if Google had succeeded with their Fuchsia efforts. So we should at least be wary and give a little pushback to this trend. It's valid to question if everything under the sun has to be rewritten and if it does, why does it have to be permissive licensing? What's the end goal?