Weakened license protection

Posted Mar 19, 2025 12:18 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Weakened license protection by excors
Parent article: Oxidizing Ubuntu: adopting Rust utilities by default

The gcc-based Rust compiler is still a long way ahead of the gcc-based compiler for a hypothetical GNU language that hasn't been invented yet.

Which is, if anything, an argument for finishing the gcc-based Rust compiler, rather than coming up with an entirely new language from scratch.

I don't believe that the GNU project has a problem in principle with Rust, the language. The fact that a Rust frontend for gcc is in the works seems to suggest otherwise.

Of course if you're a “GPL maximalist” it kinda sucks if people who used to use the GPL'ed coreutils in C are jumping ship to a different package which is technically superior, coincidentally written in Rust, and unfortunately happens to be more liberally licensed. Having said that, if the GNU project is primarily interested in a more modern coreutils replacement for the mythical “GNU operating system”, then once gcc-rs can compile uutils it can simply declare that uutils is now “part of the GNU operating system” much like, e.g., X11 or TeX (neither of which were GPL-licensed, nor part of the GNU project) were stipulated to be “part of the GNU operating system” back when the idea was new.

In any case there is certainly no urgent need for the GNU project to come up with an entirely new “GNU language” just to be able to implement a new version of the GPL coreutils. The GNU project could always write their own version, under the GPL, in Rust, to be compiled with gcc-rs once that is ready. It's just that right now the GNU project may perhaps be excused for not doing development in Rust while their own compiler can't deal with it yet.

Weakened license protection

Posted Mar 19, 2025 13:38 UTC (Wed) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (4 responses)

> I don't believe that the GNU project has a problem in principle with Rust, the language

Actually, I am not sure about, and I am not even sure we shouldn't have a problem.

https://softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2009/jul/07/0x11/

Weakened license protection

Posted Mar 19, 2025 14:38 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

> Actually, I am not sure about, and I am not even sure we shouldn't have a problem.

> https://softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2009/jul/07/0x11/

Don't see any relevance to this podcast on Rust. Why would FSF/GNU have any problems at all with Rust and if they have a problem, have they explained it?

Weakened license protection

Posted Mar 19, 2025 15:01 UTC (Wed) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (2 responses)

The unfortunate point of the podcast is that any language which is not sufficiently old (and Rust certainly isn’t) is suspicious of being attacked by patent trolls. What if somebody manages to patent a borrow checker?

Weakened license protection

Posted Mar 19, 2025 15:08 UTC (Wed) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link] (1 responses)

Obviously patent trolls are a huge problem for small and independent projects. But in this case, there are plenty of companies using Rust that have the resources to contend with them. Rust is pretty clearly prior art, but it's not even the first language to use a borrow checker. Cyclone is older, and there's academic research going back a bit before that.

Cyclone was released in 2001, so even if someone had a patent before that which they could argue covered borrow checking, it has pretty clearly expired by now.

There are absolutely risks to using newer programming languages, but I'm not convinced that patent encumbrance is a particular problem in Rust's case.

Weakened license protection

Posted Mar 20, 2025 9:06 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Also, if using GNU means always being a whole patent expiry behind everyone else they might as well shut down the project now.

A new "GNU language"

Posted Mar 19, 2025 14:07 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Against that, we're at about the right time in Rust's lifecycle for the Next Big Synthesis of Ideas (NBSoI) in programming language design to come together and produce something that's practically useful and academically interesting. If someone's going to do that under the GNU umbrella, that'd be great.

Note, though, that the NBSoI is not the only way to end up with a new language - you can also have languages that are basically the same combination of ideas as existing languages, but with a different syntax or emphasis (e.g. the huge family of Lisp-like languages). It's just that the NBSoI is where things get interesting, since it's where techniques move from "great in theory, lousy in practice" to "this is usable now".

Weakened license protection

Posted Mar 20, 2025 23:22 UTC (Thu) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

>I don't believe that the GNU project has a problem in principle with Rust, the language. The fact that a Rust frontend for gcc is in the works seems to suggest otherwise.

The GNU project doesn't control GCC, so I don't think you can draw any conclusions about GNU's view on Rust from the existence of gccrs.