I posted this over /r/StallmanWasRight and I am not sure it would be taken well at /r/Rust so here we are.
I have been getting into Rust in the last year but the licensing ecosystem of Rust crates makes me perplexed.
Today I came along this project https://github.com/uutils/coreutils that is trying to rewrite GNU coreutils in Rust and it is likely over the years projects like this one will overshadow many of the legacy GNU projects.
They are almost all made on “permissive” licenses that will give so much more power to corporations, in fact I am absolutely sure all these (big) rewrites are sponsored by corporations to escape the GNU safeguards that were built to protect users and society.
Does anyone else see this or am I just too paranoid ?
EDIT: It is not my intention to single out any specific project/team. Instead, I aim to initiate a meaningful discussion regarding the licensing choice. Rust is likely the first language since C that holds the capability to effectively replace the decades old, legacy libraries.
IMO you are being paranoid. Corporations don’t care about these utilities. They can build stuff using coreutils under the GPL without major issue. Unless they modify the source of the coreutils its self they don’t have to share anything. So it does not really matter what license it is under. And really these tools are extremely basic - not exactly hard to rewrite any of them from scratch if required (as prof of all the different implementations out there, like this and busybox to name two).
I highly doubt these are sponsored by any big corp, just hobbyists/students that think it is interesting project to undertake that don’t care as much about the GPL as much as they care about doing something interesting to them.
I wanted to test this theory, quickly looking at the commit history you can see that although the project might have started as a hobby/student weekend project, it is currently maintained by someone with an official affiliation of director at Mozilla corp.
PS: I am not pointing the finger to any entity here, I picked this project as an example to have a discussion on this topic.
So, the person that started it as a hobby got hired at a relevant field? That in of its self does not mean much. Most people that work on OSS technology are funded in some form by a company. Very very few people are funded by purely by the community or have an unrelated job and everyone needs to earn a living to eat. And it is not uncommon to get hired for the work you have done in your spare time, even if that work never gets used by the company.
This is not an uncommon story overall.