Weakened license protection

> > I kinda doubt a company will take these utils, close source them, and resell them without redistributing sources. It would bring only marginal benefit.

What it DOES bring them is a big reduction in pain. If I can ship a product, based on a publicly available tree, without all the hassle of tracking, responding to requests, etc etc, then that's a big attraction.

And regardless of whether you're an engineer, a programmer, an analyst, people at the sharp end like to collaborate. It's bean counters who all too often don't see the benefit of collaboration, but they do see the cost of getting sued.

What we need is a GPL-lite, that contains all the downstream protections, and rather than saying "you have to share the source" replaces it with "you must develop in public, and tell your customers where to find it". Basically, it has to be publicly readable, 3rd-party hosted, and advertised to upstream and downstream alike.

At the end of the day, engineers want to share, but they don't want all the GPL Administrative Hassle that comes with the GPL. All bean counters can see is the cost. The GPL is making the wrong person pay! There's a good chance I will push my changes upstream because I can see the benefit. If I don't, upstream may (or may not) mine my respository because they see a benefit. And any customer who wants the source may have a bit of grief working out exactly which source they've got, but they have got it (and if I can't tell them, that may well be a cost to me). (Programming in Excel it's costing me dear at the moment!)

Cheers.
Wol

That doesn't make much sense, though - the GPL in this case applies specifically to the coreutils code and derivatives, not to any higher level aggregation. Unless the car manufacturers are modifying the code, the only requirement for GPL compliance is documenting that they got it from upstream; given the MIT license requires copyright attribution to persist, the practical difference is zero - a little bit of text listing copyright attributions and pointing at the upstream source, or a little bit of text that only lists copyright attributions.

Unless they're actually modifying the code, of course. Which . . . well, for coreutils? I'd have to assume that's just going to be compilation support for whatever platform they're using, in which case it'd make far more sense to submit patches upstream than to maintain their own fork in-house, and the same logic would apply whether they're using GNU coreutils or uutils.

It sounds like either the companies in question don't actually understand the way the GPL works (which shouldn't be an issue if they have competent lawyers), or they're pulling an Apple and avoiding any GPLed code on ideological grounds.