I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don’t see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It’s like they’re painting their faces with “here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine”
The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire “libertarians” who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or “apolitical” tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.
To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.
it’s interesting how the move away from the gpl is never explicitly justified as a license issue: instead, people always have some plausible technical motivation. with clang/llvm it was the lower compile times and better error messages; with these coreutils it’s “rust therefore safer”. the license change was never even addressed
i believe they have to do this exactly bc permissive licenses appeal to libertarian/apolitical types who see themselves as purely rational and changing a piece of software bc of the license would sound too… ideological…
so the people in charge of these changes always have a plausible technical explanation at hand to mask away the political aspect of the change
The rust coreutils project choosing the MIT license is just another gambit to allow something like android or chromeos happen to gnu+linux, where all of the userland gets replaced by proprietary junk.
And yet that’s a popularly welcomed approach, for some reason. Just look at the number of thumbs down this has. https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/1781
yeah, unfortunately most people in the foss community are the apolitical/free thinker types who hate the fsf bc it is “too political/evangelist” and don’t want to understand how user freedom is affected by permissive licenses
it’s been a trend for a while unfortunately. getting rid of the gpl is the motivation behind e.g. companies sponsoring clang/llvm so hard right now. there are also the developers that think permissive licenses are “freer” bc freedom is doing whatever you want /s. they’re ideologically motivated to ditch the gpl so they’ll support the change even if there’s no benefit for them, financial or otherwise.
