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”
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.
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
Yeah, that’s all there’s to it, along with pure ignorance. In a past not so ideologically developed life, I’ve written code under Apache 2 because it was “more free.” Understanding licenses, their implications, the ideologies behind them and their socioeconomic effects isn’t trivial. People certainly aren’t born educated in those, and often they reach for the code editor before that.
fyi: GNU coreutils are licensed GPL, not AGPL.
there is so much other confusion in this thread, i can’t even 🤦
Or on the flip side, they want usage to be pervasive so they win. I mean come on man it’s like “move this file” and “make this directory”.
these applications aren’t rocket science and providing them under a license that people will use outside of the hardcore Linux space is just good marketing.
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.
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.
Lol even GNU and fsf failed at implementing gplv3 at all levels in Linux. And with gplv3 redhat gets awa with what they do. Also see recent agplv3 lawsuit. Gpl enforcement is real issue. If fsf wants why no create true copy left strong license no exceptions!
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
As I said there are many alternative coreutils (BSD utils, toybox) for the embrace extend extinguish. I just don’t see a model situation because that seems to me like embracing, extending and extinguishing a programming language. Nobody does that because it is not financially viable.
It’s not required to do work, if you want to use GPL licensed software for commercial applications. You need to share your source code, if you modified the GPLed code. But most people don’t modify the coreutils’ code. Are coreutils getting so much work done on them? To me it does not seem like it when this new uutils project managed to dwarf them in performance in some benchmarks.
Anyways I think I’ve read somewhere that the project author is open to change the license, if the contributors want to. I guess someone could open a discussion about it. The issue is that it cannot be people from this comment section because they cannot engage in an adult discussion. I do think it’s worth considering the advantages of changing the license to GPL, mainly that users will be forced to share their potential bug fixes. But people have to cut their Canonical conspiracy crap, which just does not make any sense and only makes it harder to convince the uutils author.
There’s no conspiracy, just people learning their lessons from years of abuse at the hands of corporations.
Here’s a fun idea, let’s fork these MIT-based projects and licence them under the AGPL :-)
You could do that. MIT is a very free license.
Of course, that would only be a useful thing to do if you were also going to contribute to the code.
True, but the mere existence of an AGPL project that follows the MIT one might be enough to convince would-be contributors to choose our version instead.
It may also be more likely to be adopted by non-corporate Linux distros that favour the AGPL over MIT (Debian for example) which in turn could help make the AGPL version the dominant one.
Note that AGPL can take changes from MIT but MIT can’t take changes that are purely AGPL without following the AGPL.
So, as far as I can understand, any improvements done to the AGPL version cannot be carried over to the MIT version (without very painful and careful re-implementation / re-engineering). That alone would be a big advantage to the hypothetical AGPL fork.
It would be a bit of a legal nightmare, since it’s theoretically possible that, even without really knowing it, the same feature might be implemented the same way in both forks separately, and the MIT devs might have no sure way to prove they did not copy it. So this would be like walking on eggshells for them.
Thats the point of GPl licenses. You cant close source it.
MIT is a free and also heavy closed source friendly. GPL fixes the greed
Yes. Did I deny that?
Can anyone confirm or deny if what I said is wrong?
I get downvoted for stating one advantage an AGPL fork would have, and yet nobody seems to be disagreeing with what I said… *shrugs* 🤷
A glitch in the matrix.
Ok idk. Your message felt like it wants to explain why we shouldnt use GPL/lgpl
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.
I edited my comment to better and more fully reflect my thoughts. It’s hard to properly express myself when I’ve been as sick as I have been with bronchitis and possible pneumonia for the past 4 weeks.
Hopefully my comment now better reflects my thoughts.
Had bronchitis as a child nearly every few weeks for years. All gone but sucks to have it.
Get well soon.
I still feel like, the point where you say more people can use it and will use it, can create a dark pattern.
Imagine you create something and make people depending on it. Another cooperation copies it and advances it with a lot of money. Somehow, the ecosystem is so changed, that when you depend on that project, you need to use the newer version of the cooperation and soon they will paywall it heavily.
Then, your wish for people using the code as much as possible got nuked.
I assume that many scenarios will allow the usage of your old MIT project without relying on the new version of someone. But rare cases exist, where this happens. Its like predicting the 30th step in chess or smth. (Idk chess that well)
Its… unlikely that it will happen, but yeah. I can understand your perspective, but slowly going to AGPL sounds right.
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.
In my Company, we do use such code. But its mainly because we distribute our own Propriatary Linux OS.
We sometimes need to change such code, so we just put it on Github as a fork.
