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.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
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.
"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.
I work in a company that deals with both commercial and government (military) software. The government is becoming more and more fixated on the software supply chain, or sw dependencies so to speak.
Existing dependencies are largely getting a pass for now, but with each new one I need to give a justification for. This includes the license of that software. I can't use GPL at work.
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
Well the dev said that he does not care about the license. He wanted to create a coreutils alternative with better concurency using Rust as a pet project. He had even stated that he was not interested in the MIT vs GPL drama, yet people here were acting like children over it.
People think it's some kind of Canonical evil master plan, yet it's just some random dude slapping a license on his cool new code, without really thinking about it. Also this conspiracy does not make sense at so many levels. For one Canonical would shoot themselves into their foot if they created their own proprietary coreutils, because admins would not want to deal with non-portable scripts. Also there are already the BSD utils, so if they wanted to create their own fork, they would have already done that by now. They won't because they prefer free labor from FOSS devs.
The license matters. MIT allows for the embrace extend extinguish approach, or for companies to completely ignore contributions back to the main src.
Whatever he says he is doing doesn’t matter. In the long run a MIT license won’t be good. There’s a reason why the gnu core utils get so much work done on them. Because it’s required if you wish to use the code in your commercial applications