Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 2:11 UTC (Thu) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by pizza
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

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.

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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.