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   Matthew Garrett (mjg59@nondeterministic.computer)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Mar-2025 12:11:06 JST Matthew Garrett

   I'm a huge proponent of copyleft licensing, I'm in favour of using the GPL as a tool to ensure users have the ability to modify the software on their devices, and I'm just having trouble getting too worked up about the Rust reimplementation of Coreutils being MIT. Philosophically? Yeah, it sucks. Practical outcomes? Almost certainly none. The GPL violators aren't going to change coreutils implementation to avoid being sued, the FSF wasn't going to do that anyway

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     Matthew Garrett (mjg59@nondeterministic.computer)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Mar-2025 12:16:50 JST Matthew Garrett

     in reply to

     What Coreutils-adjacent GPL enforcement there has been centred around Busybox, a GPLed implementation of many POSIX and Unixish tools, commonly used in embedded devices. Busybox-related enforcement has been an effective tool in obtaining compliance, to the extent that it's been reimplemented under a permissive licence with the explicit goal of reducing enforcement risk. Coreutils has simply never been subject to enforcement in the same way, so there's no significant impact.

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     Matthew Garrett (mjg59@nondeterministic.computer)'s status on Tuesday, 18-Mar-2025 12:22:21 JST Matthew Garrett

     in reply to

     Nobody is going to try to make money on a proprietary fork of an MIT Coreutils. Nobody is hiding their trade secrets there. This isn't the 80s.

     What is a bigger issue is the more symbolic nature of things. People had the opportunity to pick a copyleft licence and chose not to. We can view this as an attack on copyleft (albeit one that's likely symbolic at best), or we can accept that the copyleft community has been doing a poor job winning the hearts and minds of new generations of developers

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