Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 9, 2021 21:41 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by micka
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

That's normal reaction from someone who belongs to “free software” camp. That was discussed for many years (e.g. see this thread).

The fact that free software movement is dying makes them really bitter. But somehow they still don't understand that if people don't accept their ideals then it's highly unlikely that they would try to support them.

For some reason they act like a truly religious person: not trying to understand why other people may not share their belief but just assume they are not supporting it just because they haven't achieved “the enlightenment” yet.

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 9, 2021 22:06 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

>The fact that free software movement is dying makes them really bitter.

Is it really dying, though? It was never "popular" to begin with, with its proponents always looked upon with derision.

In absolute terms, it's probably larger than ever. But as a portion of "the market" it's shrunk considerably.

But I suspect the bitterness is more due to this whole situation pretty much playing out as predicted. We're seeing the beginnings of the second round of BSD wars, only this time fueled by Apache-licensed stuff instead, and of course, users will be screwed over left and right in even greater numbers.

Time will tell. *shrug*

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 14:10 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

> It was never "popular" to begin with, with its proponents always looked upon with derision.

True, but these proponents were able to coopt people with a different mindset. The ones who later have formed the “open source” movement.

There was some friction between these two groups, but Linus is still considering adoption of GPL as one of the best decisions he ever did in development of Linux.

Today… these people are leaving. GCC team haven't divorced FSF yes, but this is, surely, step in that direction.

> We're seeing the beginnings of the second round of BSD wars, only this time fueled by Apache-licensed stuff instead, and of course, users will be screwed over left and right in even greater numbers.

Maybe. This wouldn't happen any time soon, though.

> Time will tell. *shrug*

Sure. But only our descendants will be able to tell. When was TiVo made? 22 years ago? That's almost quarter-century. The promised doom haven't materialized yet.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 22:06 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

> Today… these people are leaving. GCC team haven't divorced FSF yes, but this is, surely, step in that direction.

That doesn't mean the toolchain hackers aren't free software people any more. It's still GPL-licensed and will remain so. Being in favour of free software and wanting to give RMS sole unquestioned authority over your project are *not* the same thing. I wish people would stop assuming they were.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 22:41 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> Sure. But only our descendants will be able to tell. When was TiVo made? 22 years ago? That's almost quarter-century. The promised doom haven't materialized yet.

On the contrary; it's come to pass many times over, now affecting the overwhelming majority of computing devices sold.

Oh, and heavy equipment. Farmers shouldn't have to commit felonies just to get their equipment working again:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7m8mx/john-deere-promise...

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 13, 2021 22:58 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

> On the contrary; it's come to pass many times over, now affecting the overwhelming majority of computing devices sold.

I think you are mixing two very tangentially related issues:

Tivoisation/lockdown — which predates FSF and GNU and is wasn't ever a problem in BSD wars.
Balcanization — creation of incompatible software platforms which makes life of software developers miserable

Lockdown is happening, of course, as I have said it was a thing half-century ago and even before. Industry always wanted that, that's why we have these fancy screwdriver bits, e.g.

But balcanization… not sure where one can see it today. What makes all these numerous proprietary works of LLVM any different from proprietary forks of GCC which were supplied (and still are supplied) in various projects? Yes, technically speaking I can look on the code of TI-GCC or GPC and try to backport fixes from GCC12… but practically speaking it wouldn't much easier than attempting to replicate work embedded in these LLVM forks.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 28, 2021 14:01 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

Surely the biggest difference is that vendors of LLVM forks don't have to give you the source code to the forks?