It’s a cool project but does anyone else find the choice of MIT kinda icky/disrespectful? Like maintainers have put decades of work into the GNU coreutils under the gpl and all that entails, and then some people decide to rewrite it and just say “nah”.
I know they claim it’s a clean implementation but cmon, there’s no way they aren’t peeking at the existing coreutils source.
Do you think it was disrespectful for the GNU project to reimplement the original tools in a different license than the original authors had written them in?
AFAIK the GNU authors didn’t have access to the original source code because they were proprietary. I don’t know why this matters but it feels different in a purely “feels” way.
The GNU authors almost certainly did have access to the AT&T UNIX source code, and they had to be reminded not to refer to UNIX source code when writing GNU replacements. GNU made intentional efforts to design their programs along completely different lines to avoid similarity to the originals. This is described at https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Reading-No... under "Referring to Proprietary Programs".
Yes and no; due to antitrust laws with AT&T, almost everyone had copies of UNIX source code, especially if you were near any universities (why does BSD still honor UC Berkeley on bootup, do you think?). Easy as pie to get; but extremely difficult to legally use without a license.
The question about whether Linux and GNU copied from the proprietary originals caused the famous SCO lawsuits. Even though this was proven false, there’s very little chance the originals weren’t used as reference in GNU.
Gotcha! I don’t, but that’s why I asked, I wasn’t sure if this was about any specific license or what.
I’m also curious about this: does that it’s in a different language make any difference here? Like I could also maybe see what you’re saying if these were also in C, but being in Rust, it’s not like they can literally copy the code, regardless. I know you’re talking about feelings and not hard and fast rules, but do you think that plays into any of the feelings at all?
Not really. I love Rust. It’s all I want to write these days.
My feelings stem from what I perceive as the degradation of the old school hacker ethos into a more corporate friendly environment. Especially during this time when the bigger companies are salivating at the mouth to replace SWEs with AI at the same time encouraging us to pick friendly licenses so they can take advantage of our volunteer work…
I didn’t mean that it was about Rust specifically, just that if a language change factored in.
Anyway, thanks for replying. It’s always interesting to hear how people think. I personally feel differently, but I’m sure it’s nothing you haven’t heard before. :)
No. The original UNIX utilities were under proprietary licenses for an extremely long time, before eventually they broke free under BSD. The BSD tools are descendants of the originals and are also the versions used by macOS.
BSD wasn’t under an open license when GNU got started, so GNU reimplemented the proprietary UNIX utilities with their own enhancements and their own GPL license.
As such, complaining about the license is rich, considering GNU basically stole it themselves from the first round. And to this day, HN complaining about macOS’s utilities is also rich considering they are actually more standard and authentically UNIX than GNU.
Only if you think it’s also icky for OpenJDK to have a clean room port of Java. I’m sure oracle would love to force Android and everyone else using Java to pay licensing fees in perpetuity.
I know they claim it’s a clean implementation but cmon, there’s no way they aren’t peeking at the existing coreutils source.