At first I was sceptical, but after a few thought, I came to the solution that, if uutils can do the same stuff, is/stays actively maintained and more secure/safe (like memory bugs), this is a good change.
What are your thoughts abouth this?
On the one hand, Toybox exists. So, the non-copyleft license bs isn’t new. On the other hand, toybox afaik isnt aiming to treat “deviations with GNu as bugs”. Almost feels hostile-takeover-ish though I know that almost certinly isn’t the idea behindbit.
If this ends in proprietization bs I’m going to throw hands.
I’m mixed on it. If it is more secure/safe then that’s a good thing, but if it’s done because it’s MIT-licensed instead of GPL-licensed, then that could possibly be concerning.
The correct title should be “Ubuntu explores replacing gnu utils with MIT licenced uutils”.
Waiting for Canonical to up sell proprietary utils features by subscription. Ubuntu’s regular release cycles were brilliant in 2004 when there weren’t a lot of alternatives but why does it still exist?
Sorry, “tee” is not part of the basic Ubuntu package. Do you want to unlock premium coreutils for the cheap price of 19.99$ p.m.? Alternatively, upgrade your Ubuntu pro to pro-double-plus-good for 10$ p.m.
What does this have to do with MIT licensing?
the deGPLification of the Linux ecosystem ffs
I would love this news if it didn’t move away from the GPL.
Mass move to MIT is just empowering enshittification by greedy companies.
What does the license change actually mean? What are the differences?
The best example I could point to would be BSD. Unlike Linux, the BSD kernel was BSD (essentially MIT) -licensed. This allowed Apple to take their code and build OSX and a multi-billion dollar company on top of it, giving sweet fuck all back the community they stole from.
That’s the moral argument: it enables thievery.
The technical argument is one of practicality. MIT-licensed projects often lead to proprietary projects (see: Apple, Android, Chrome, etc) that use up all the oxygen in an ecosystem and allow one company to dominate where once we had the latitude to use better alternatives.
- Step 1 is replacing coreutils with uutils.
- Step 2 is Canonical, Google, or someone else stealing uutils to build a proprietary “fuutils” that boasts better speeds, features, or interoperation with $PROPRIETARY_PRODUCT, or maybe even a new proprietary kernel.
- Step 3 is where inevitably uutils is abandoned and coreutils hasn’t been updated in 10 years. Welcome to 1978, we’re back to using UNIX.
The GPL is the tool that got us here, and it makes these exploitative techbros furious that they can’t just steal our shit for their personal profit. We gain nothing by helping them, but stand to lose a great deal.
Thanks for your explanation.
The code can be taken and used in close source projects
And how does this hurt all of us who use it for open source projects?
Competitive improvements the company makes make be kept secret, re packaged, and sold without making contributions to the src code.
Basically embrace, extend, extinguish
Ideas can only be patented, not copyrighted. If a company designs something novel enough to qualify for a patent, and so good that people willingly pay for the feature, that’s impressive, and arguably still a good thing. If instead they design a better user experience, or an improvement in performance, the ideas can be used in open source, even when the code cannot be.
@prime_number_314159 @thedeadwalking4242 this is how Google killed RSS
Patents kill innovation. No one should be granted rights to a concept purely because they got to it first. It’s still really.
I didn’t even say anything about copyright or patent?
Imagine a contributor of the project. He would have been fixing the bug for free and give the work to the public project. Right before he submits the code change, he sees an ad from a big tech bro: “Hiring. Whoever can fix this bug gets this job and a sweet bonus.” He hesitated and worked for the company instead.
Now that he is the employee of the company. He can’t submit the same bug fix to the open source project because it is now company property. The company’s product is bug free, and the open source counterpart remains buggy.
means it can also be captured by a corpo takeover and taken private
It can be forked by anyone, but what is already out there will always be there.
Until you’re left with choosing between an abandoned open source version and an up to date closed source blob.
To give you an example, if git was under the MIT license instead of GPL , then Microsoft can silently add incompatible features to GitHub without anyone knowing. The regular git client appears to work for a while. Then they start advertising msgit with some extra GitHub features and shortcuts. Once they get to 50% adoption they simply kill the open source version off.
If GitHub required a special client to be installed tomorrow… I would have to concede and use it. It’s GPL that stops that because everyone has to get every new feature.
When Slack was first rolling out the dev team in my office of 50 people we all hated it. Thankfully it had an IRC bridge so we could use Slack through IRC. It was seemingly the same experience as before except more business users were in the chat rooms. Once the Corp side of the business were onboard, they dropped IRC support, forcing us to use their clients.
Now it doesn’t matter that rules or laws or privacy invasion they do. They have captured the companies communications and can hold it hostage.
I’ve seen it again and again. When is the last time you downloaded an MP3 file?
Genuinely what negative ramifications could come of uutils being MIT licensed? The kernel license isn’t going to change and I really don’t see how companies can abuse uutils for a profit.
Okay, I’m not a fan of this either but let’s not get too worried about this. Everyone’s known Ubuntu is a joke for a long time and they don’t really have much influence on even several of their downstreams, let alone the rest of the ecosystem.
I think Ubuntu has a lot of influence in industry
My scepticism is that this should’ve been done within the coreutils project, or at least very closely affiliated. This isn’t an area of the linux technical stack that we should tolerate being made distro-specific, especially when the licensing is controlled by a single organisation that famously picks and chooses its interpretation of “FOSS” to suit its profit margins.
On a purely technical level, GNU coreutils should very seriously consider moving to rust if only to counter alternatives before it’s too late. While these utilities work well in C (and usually stay secure thanks to the Unix philosophy limiting the project scope), FOSS projects are continuing to struggle with finding new contributors as younger devs are more likely to use modern systems languages like Go and Rust. Not to mention that any project using Rust as a marketing tool will appeal to anyone rightfully concerned about hardening their system.
uutils is not distro-specific.
Time for Mecha-Stallman to declare war.
The time has come to GNU-slash the enemies of freedom!
It’s funny since don’t these core utils come from bsd meaning the new license is more like the original license than gpl is like either. So didn’t gnu effectively steal the code and change the license for political reasons?
I for one welcome our rust overlords
I personally don’t see the point.
I fear moving away from GPL that moving to Rust seems to bring, but Rust does fix real memory issues.
Take the recent rsync vulnerabilities for example.
At least this one in a Rust implementation of rsync would have very likely been avoided:
CVE-2024-12085 – A flaw was found in the rsync daemon which could be triggered when rsync compares file checksums. This flaw allows an attacker to manipulate the checksum length (s2length) to cause a comparison between a checksum and uninitialized memory and leak one byte of uninitialized stack data at a time. Info Leak via uninitialized Stack contents defeats ASLR.
Mainly memory safety;
split(which is also used for other programs likesort) had a memory heap overflow issue last year to name one. The GNU Coreutils are well tested and very well written, the entire suite of programs has a CVE only once every few years from what I can see, but they do exist and most of those would be solved with a memory and type safe language.That said, Rust also handles parallelism and concurrency much better than C ever could, though most of these programs don’t really benefit from that or not much since they already handled this quite well, especially for C programs.
I prefer a glibc replacement.
GNU/LinuxRust/Linuxuutils/Linux?
Systemd/Linux
I wonder whether Linux Mint will follow suit?
Mint is basically Ubuntu with all of Canonical’s BS removed. This definitely counts as Canonical BS, so I’d be surprised if it made its way into Mint.
Canonical making open source software that is more secure than the code it replaces and offering it for free is canonical bs? If so give me more.
Here I thought canonical bs was just that stupid docker snap thing they did.
As I recall Ubuntu will allow to switch uutils to coreutils. So it looks like Linux Mint will continue to use coreutils
Likely not anytime soon as they tend to hold off latest features and prefer older (but maintained) LTS versions of just about everything. Also especially not if it turns out to be a bad idea; they explicitly build Mint without Snaps since their inclusion in the Ubuntu base.
So i hear that removing all the gnu stuff opens linux to be redistributed with a bew liesinse like mit. Which means its a little more closed iff a little more monitized.
Not knowledge enough on my own to know for sure. If someone with more knowledge could explain.
This is one of the old-time original arguments in the OSS community.
The crux of the matter is that the GNU licenses require that modifications be released back to the community. Other “more permissible” licenses like MIT do not.
So if you want to make a commercial version of X, and X is under a GPL, then any changes you make need to be released under the GPL. The idea being “I shared this code with the community with the intent that you can use it for free and modify it as you like, but you need to share back what you do.” Also called “Share and share alike”.
This defends against “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics that companies like Microsoft has loved to do. They can’t take your code, modify it for their own purposes and re-sell it possibly making a more popular version that is now proprietary.
The Linux kernel still is and will always be GPL. It really doesnt matter if the coreutils aren’t.
