What an absolute shitshow
The real shitshow is it’s MIT licensing. Corporate takeover 101
How is it a takeover, if they write their own set of tools?
The gnu brained folks hate when we make our own tools.
I love rust, but I absolutely hate how it’s used to jam MIT licenses where GPL belongs. Maybe it’s time we consider using corpos tools against them, and use an AI to rewrite GNU utils to Rust, so that people can continue contributing to Rust while not feeding corps?
Edit: Though licensing AI software is iffy at best, you’ve got to own the copyright to something to licence it: Non-human productions are legally non-copyrightable. Also it might be better to just have humans do it anyway. The intent of my message was just that maybe we ought to deprive MIT-licensed projects from FOSS-motivated developers by providing Rust GPL alternatives to MIT/corporate Rust projects
What an absolute shitshow
I’d say the month of June is actually a good time to be breaking and fixing things in a release that is due to come out in (checks notes) October.
No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release and definitely it should not have a break in something basic just because the language used to write the command break backword compatibilty
No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release
This bug was reported (and resolved by rolling back to the GNU coreutils version of
cp) on June 30, a little over 15 weeks prior to the scheduled release date.Which distros have a feature freeze that far in advance?
Ubuntu hasn’t even scheduled theirs for this release yet; if you edit that url to look at previous releases’ schedules you can see their feature freeze and debian import freezes are typically about 2 months prior to release. (See here for descriptions of all of the different types of freezes…)
Im so happy work stopped using ubuntu server after last time.
Also how the heck do you break cp of all things.
I dont want to experiment with core utils.
Give me 10 minutes and I’ll write you a cp that is completely fucked.
The project hasn’t had a stable release, and yes, it does certainly need more testing to uncover edge cases.
Yes, MIT bad, but one must not diss on the project just because it has been written in Rust.
I disagree with MIT License being bad. I agree on all other fronts of your statements.
MIT is terrible if it replaces current GPL projects. Companies will always provide their spyware infested proprietary version of the exact same thing which have one or two additional features, making open source software always behind rhe propruetary counterparts. See: Chromium->Google Chrome, Aosp->any Android os vendor
Great projects have used MIT without any issues. Godot for instance, which may also be needed, I don’t know if games made by godot could be closed source if it would use gnu license for instance.
Godot didn’t replace an existing broadly used GPL game engine, so this is irrelevant.
The logic was that with a mit license companies will provide a copy of the software infected with spyware leaving the open source project behind.
Explain why that hasn’t happened to godot.
Why don’t you think the MIT license is bad?
Why do you think the MIT License is bad? I am not the one making the claim it being bad, so I’m not the on in defending position. It’s an open source license and I like to use it too (granted my work is just little small hobby tools). I think the MIT License has pros and cons, but isn’t straight a bad license in this context.
Because it isn’t a free software license. Software licensed by the MIT license can be copied and made into proprietary software. Since (I hope) we agree proprietary software should be minimised licensing under a free software license ensures big tech can’t make there own corporate software from it without ever giving back.
It IS free software license. It just gives the freedom to turn it into proprietary too, in which case the new proprietary product is no longer licensed under MIT. Which in turn does not violate the MIT being free, as it became a different thing.
No. I’m talking about the free software foundations definition of free software. The mit license is an open source licence, not a free software license.
Anyway, I’m interested as to why you don’t think the MIT license is worse than the GPL.
You linked the right definition but you are wrong. MIT is a Free Software license.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat
Open Source and Free Software are just two different philosophies – the licenses are the same. A Free Software license also works as an Open Source license and vice versa.
Rust-rewriting is a kind of madness. I like Rust, it’s an amazing language. But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.
The MIT license also is a concern. I understand that many projects use it, and we can’t just reject them because of the license. But here we don’t see an innovation under MIT license - we see a copy of existing GNU tools, with hilarious issues and a corporation-friendly license.
The fact uutils are being shipped despite being so raw shows that this is not about better software. The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.
And the quality level of uutils being already shipped tells they either make free alpha testers for the corpos of the users, or there were no competent programmers to take part in the development.
C will remain the core of the modern digital world for many years. It is impossible to rewrite everything to Rust in a couple of years. It needs a careful professional approach if we really want this to make software better. But in this case, no one does.
But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.
The uutils author knows this. His motivation was performance. It’s easier to write fast code in Rust for him.
The fact uutils are being shipped despite being so raw shows that this is not about better software. The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.
You are mashing two things into one.
- uutils is just making Open Source software.
- Canonical ships it despite the project being so raw.
uutils don’t have any rights to tell Canonical if and when can the software be incorporated into Ubuntu.
