Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 9, 2021 23:22 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by karim
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

The 1995 GNU Project was doing a very good job of providing something close-enough to the base of a contemporary Unix workstation, once you added X and Linux and a bunch of other stuff.

In 2021 the FSF have decided that their guiding light is a guy who needs assistants to book travel so he doesn't have to use JavaScript and browses the web via email. The FSF endorses a hardware strategy that valorises leaving your hardware with known-insecure firmware installed because installing security updates from the vendor is "unfree" and bad.

The FSF have chosen to become irrelevant to how people want to live their lives and interact with technology in favor of a weird, insecure, retrocomputing experience, rather than providing meaningful free alternatives. It's no wonder that people are interpeting this is damage and working around it. It's unfortunate that this has tainted people's impression of the GPL; I'm very keen on the share-and-share-alike philosophy that rests at its core. But it's become tainted by the FSF's disinterest in learning what humans want to do, in preference for hectoring developers and users alike.

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 0:38 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> The 1995 GNU Project was doing a very good job of providing something close-enough to the base of a contemporary Unix workstation, once you added X and Linux and a bunch of other stuff.

> The FSF have chosen to become irrelevant to how people want to live their lives and interact with technology in favor of a weird, insecure, retrocomputing experience

In other words, you're saying the world changed, but the FSF did not?

(The FSF was never particularly aligned with how "people want[ed] to live their lives and interact with technology". They've been pushing against the grain from the very beginning!)

> rather than providing meaningful free alternatives

Sure, the FSF, with its couple-hundred-thousand/year budget and one full-time employee, is somehow supposed to out-produce Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc etc combined. Plus a couple dozen data centers. Gotcha.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 2:11 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

That's capitalism. Adapt or die.

If the FSF wants to fritter away its goodwill on irrelevant work that few people care for, well, it's their organization to run as they see fit. But IMHO it's unwise to play such dangerous games with the GPLv4 (or GPLvN+1) relicensing rights. If they continue on their current path, they will eventually run out of mindshare, donations, and ultimately cash reserves, and GPLv4 will get auctioned off to the highest bidder. That will be interesting to watch, but I sincerely hope it doesn't happen for a long time.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 3:02 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

My point, again, is that the FSF has been "irrelevant" for most of its existence, subject to endless scorn and derision. For a brief period there was superficial alignment with business interests ("you mean I don't have to pay for this software or compensate its authors?" quickly morphed to "how DARE you place conditions on my use of the software I didn't pay for!") but outside from a few high-profile exceptions, that bubble has long since deflated.

And that's fine; Good riddance.

The FSF, GNU, and copyleft in general are slowly reverting back to what it was before the big venture-capital dotcom bubble; ie folks writing software on a volunteer basis for largely ideological reasons. As long as there are folks who believe in those principles, it will continue. If not, then, well, nope.

Speaking of capitalism, at the end of the day, what the average user calls "software" (or "app") is actually a "service". You can't compete with services by providing software.