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ruenoak

Member

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2017-05-28

Posts: 68  

Website

oxidising our Freedom

Microsoft gets behind Coreutils this has been getting around the tech sites recently.
https://linuxiac.com/microsoft-brings-l … o-windows/

I'm general a septic of conspiracy theories, and Microsoft using open source code is not an issue, but Microsoft has been a strong supporter of rust for some time now. Also actively promoting the end of C and rewriting C based applications.

As said, I'm general a septic of conspiracy theories, but I am starting to believe the writing of GPL code to rust clones, has little to do with memory safety an more to do with the removal of the GPL license.
The GPL has always been problematic in the corporate world, and there is a very active group of people that have positioned themselves into FOSS projects that openly despise people such as RMS and anything associated with him, GPL, GNU, FSF etc.

I'm well aware we don't live in a GNU world where all can come together sharing code to create great software for the masses, that utopia doesn't exist.
If MS released their flagship office product under a free license and asked people politely to contribute financially or paid support? Yeah fat chance! The company would tank.

Write your applications in rust or what ever else takes your fancy and release it under what ever license you like. that's fine, that's democracy.
But rewriting applications to remove and re-license it, is unethical and without honor. I'm afraid I don't buy the memory safe excuse.
I could be completely wrong and it has nothing to do with erasing and replacing free licenses, but the trend I am noticing makes me uneasy.

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"Has cat, eats cheese, drinks coffee, Chaotic Neutral "

EDX-0

Member

Registered: 2020-12-12

Posts: 240  

Re: oxidising our Freedom

there are more coreutils implementations than just gnu and uutils, like the bsd and the solaris ones, and those are not released under the GPL.

if i had to guess why microsoft used uutils as base for their core utils i'd say it is because the solaris and bsd implementations are more closely tied to the rest of their userland or even their kernel while uutils were more readily capable of working in the microsoft environment without much modifcation

as for "...rewriting applications to release them under a different license from the original is unethical and without honor..." may i remind you that both the GNU and the BSD implementations of the core utilities (grep, awk, cat, head, tail, date, ls, stat, cp, mv, rm, mkdir, wc, sleep, pwd, ETC...) were "re-written" from scratch off the original bell labs/at&t unix core utilites to avoid being subject to the UNIX licensing terms, so please write richard stallman an email about how "unethical and honor-less" he, the FSF's GNU team as well as the BSD developers from back in the day were for re-creating software that already existed but in licenses that undermined the original bell labs authors.

Last edited by EDX-0 (Today 03:04:43)

SteveM

Member

Registered: 2025-07-16

Posts: 14  

Re: oxidising our Freedom

But rewriting applications to remove and re-license it, is unethical and without honor.

If you look you will find DebConf videos from several years ago before all this blew up where the main developer working on uutils at the time makes it clear that he did care what the license was as long as it was FOSS and his main motivation was to have fun with Rust. We need to be careful not to rush about on witch hunts. Is Ubuntu being dumb? Yes. What's new?

ETA:
Found a post said DD made about this.

When your side COVID hobby project to learn Rust ends up behind Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella at Build 2026…

Maybe you did something right? 😅

Great moment for Uutils, Rust, and open source!

Last edited by SteveM (Today 03:52:19)

EDX-0

Member

Registered: 2020-12-12

Posts: 240  

Re: oxidising our Freedom

not rushing to witch hunt? where is the fun in that?