This project is suspicious [LWN.net]

This project is suspicious

Posted Dec 6, 2024 12:32 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: This project is suspicious by coriordan
Parent article: Apertis v2024 released

Furthermore it is kind of disparaging for rust-coreutils.
Instead of presenting rust-coreutils on its merit as an implementation of coreutils in a safer language, it is presented as a way to work around coreutils license, that is as an inferior solution whose only purpose is to satisfy some beancounter.

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This project is suspicious

Posted Dec 6, 2024 13:02 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

To be fair, many of the GNU utilities started as a way to work around the licence of the original Unix implementations.

This project is suspicious

Posted Dec 6, 2024 14:32 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

But the GNU utilities, and their licence, were written to ensure that users received the freedoms.

The GNU utilities underline that giving people freedom is always good. There's no point being made that working around licences is always good. It depends on the goal.

The Unix implementations that were released under, for example, a BSD licence, were often modified by vendors and then the source code wasn't provided for the modified version. Same for X Windows / xfree86. So they were free software when published by the developers, but weren't free software when used by the users.

Richard invented the GPL licences to fix this problem and ensure that users received the freedoms.

Apertis is the opposite. They're looking for clever ways to help companies *not* give freedoms to users.

This project is suspicious

Posted Dec 6, 2024 16:24 UTC (Fri) by a-wai (subscriber, #126817) [Link]

> They're looking for clever ways to help companies *not* give freedoms to users.

This claim doesn't acknowledge the reality that GPL-2 software (such as e.g. systemd or the Linux kernel) is an important part of Apertis and won't go away anytime soon. That's still GPL, just not the latest version.

The fact that rust-coreutils is MIT is completely orthogonal: it would still be the best choice for Apertis if it were licensed under the GPL-2, for example.

(note: I'm a Collabora employee and have worked on Apertis in the past, including the rust-coreutils transition)

This project is suspicious

Posted Dec 6, 2024 13:10 UTC (Fri) by mwelchuk (subscriber, #85200) [Link] (1 responses)

> Instead of presenting rust-coreutils on its merit as an implementation of coreutils in a safer language, it is presented as a way to work around coreutils license, that is as an inferior solution whose only purpose is to satisfy some beancounter.

Who's saying that they're inferior? The fact they're written in a memory safe language is a big plus.

This project is suspicious

Posted Dec 6, 2024 20:10 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

By only using rust-coreutils for customers that have special need license-wise, instead of rust-coreutils being used everywhere, Collabora is saying that they consider coreutils to be superior to rust-coreutils, whether they mean it or not.