Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 0:46 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by Wol
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

> That's your choice, more importanlly that's your right! But the trade-off that works for you doesn't work for Joe Average User.

... so you're saying that folks that don't write software don't get to chose how their software gets used?

When "Joe Average User" gets fed up with getting trampled on, stuff will start changing. As an example of this, farmers are driving the "right to repair" movement.

(Another example -- the entire "maker" community. They're largely about "empowering users" too, only it tends to get expressed in non-software manners)

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 8:09 UTC (Thu) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (2 responses)

> When "Joe Average User" gets fed up with getting trampled on, stuff will start changing.

Issues of how people go about their digital lives, and to which extent they are themselves in control of it ("digital sovereignty" if you will) are certainly increasingly important. We have $multibillion corporate empires encouraging and monetizing online bigotry and hatred, influencing democracy in a very negative way, and may even be implicated in genocides (Myanmar). The free software movement could be a powerful public voice in all this. But no, instead it's retreating into the "by and for unix geeks stuck in 1990" world, rendering itself irrelevant.

> As an example of this, farmers are driving the "right to repair" movement.

Indeed; "farmers", "right to repair movement". Where is the free software movement in all this? Sitting far away in a corner lamenting the existence of permissively licensed projects like uutils or LLVM and hoping they fail.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 10:25 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> The free software movement could be a powerful public voice in all this. But no, instead it's retreating into the "by and for unix geeks stuck in 1990" world, rendering itself irrelevant.

What, exactly, are they supposed to be doing? Again, they have a shoestring budget and are up against companies who spend more than that every month on office supplies for their PR department. And do you honestly believe governments who think nothing of shooting their own people care what some foreign geeks think?

> Indeed; "farmers", "right to repair movement". Where is the free software movement in all this? Sitting far away in a corner lamenting the existence of permissively licensed projects like uutils or LLVM and hoping they fail.

The Free Software has been there all along, with formal organizations issuing press releases and filing occasional court briefs in support of the farmers. y'know, being an advocate like they've always been, with volunteers writing software to help solve problems they personally care about. That is literally all they can do, write software and be an advocate -- because that's all the legal regime allows -- anything more (such as developing alternatives) requires breaking DRM, which even talking about is enough to expose you to ruinous fines and jail time in most (if not all) developed countries.

The the FSF (and the greater Free Software movement) is not a corporation capable of imposing top-down direction onto a massive army of employees (and another army of lobbyists to bribe politicians) but that's what it's up against.

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 14:24 UTC (Thu) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

> What, exactly, are they supposed to be doing? Again, they have a shoestring budget and are up against companies who spend more than that every month on office supplies for their PR department.

True. It's not an easy or guaranteed win. But if your compare to, say, the abolitionists or suffragettes back in the day, they didn't have any money compared to the moneyed interests they were up against either. But they won, because they had morality and ethics on their side, and were able to leverage that into mass movements that supported their causes. I hope the free software movement could do the same in helping (not saying the free software movement must do this alone!) rein in the excesses of surveillance capitalism. But a narrow focus on copyleft won't achieve that, as most people who aren't software developers won't even understand what they're talking about, much less understand why it would matter and why they should care.

Freedom for people matter. Freedom for software doesn't, per se, except as a means to an end.