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The dangerous push by Canonical to rewrite GNU coreutils as Rust code without the GNU license (techrights.org)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by loveknight@programming.dev to c/opensource@programming.dev

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Earlier post version: image/text.

From another article referenced there:

The maintainers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution are now rewriting GNU Coreutils in Rust. Instead of using the GPLv3 license, which is designed to make sure that the freedoms and rights of the user of the program are preserved and always respected over everything else, the new version is going to be released using the very permissible or "permissive" (non-reciprocal) MIT license, which allows creating proprietary closed-source forks of the program.

There will surely be small incompatibilities - either intentional or accidental - between the Rust rewrite of coreutils and the GNU/C version. If the Rust version becomes popular - and it probably will, if Ubuntu starts using it - the Rust people will start pushing their own versions of higher level programs that are only compatible with the Rust version of coreutils. They will most probably also spam commits to already existing programs making them incompatible with the GNU/C version of coreutils. That way either everyone will be forced into using the MIT-licensed Rust version of coreutils, or the Linux userland becomes even more broken than it already is because now we have again two incompatible sets of runtime functions that conflict with one another. Either way, both outcomes benefit the corporations that produce proprietary software.

(Source – which does contain some more-than-problematic language outside of these passages, compare the valid objections raised by others in the cross-posts.)

Compare also how leaders of Canonical/Ubuntu have ties to Microsoft, and how the Canonical employee who leads the push to rewrite coreutils as non-GPL-licensed Rust software has spent years working for the British Army, where he "Architected and built multiple high-end bespoke Electronic Surveillance capabilities", by his own proud admission.

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[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The licensing concern is serious. And it's a serious concern if corporations are using Rust migration as a Trojan horse for undermining the GPL. These are political problems and it would be a shame to see these undermine the popularity of a pretty useful programming language.

The lack of Rust compiler support for older machines is a real concern, especially if we start losing access to the C/C++ versions of core libraries as distros stop including them or as developers stop supporting them. But older machines already need to run some pretty specialized versions of Linux rather than the mainstream distros, because this isn't the only place where new distros are moving away from long-term backwards compatibility, and everything is more resource hungry these days.

All the whining about "Rust people" though is a bit insufferable and off-putting. It seems like an issue of corporations setting the direction rather than a reason to resent Rust developers as such.

[–] loveknight@programming.dev 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Agree on everything. (As for the off-putting statements about 'Rust people': Since the article was published on March 19, I wonder if much of it, revolving around what the author saw as indications of authoritarianism, came from heavy disquiet in the face of authoritarianism's recent gaining hold of the White house. I'd even consider it likely that people who post on Techrights have an above-average sensitivity for this kind of thing. It could be that the author has since arrived at a more differentiated and just view. Of note, since the time of his writing, the Rust project did remedy things that he criticized about their website.)