Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust
Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust
Posted Jun 10, 2021 10:13 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by Wol
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust
> If Fuschia breaks away from that, it could leave linux behind (which is a good thing), but it could leave Linus behind, and that most definitely is a BAD thing.
For better or for worse, but that's not in a cards. Fuschia have to run Android apps well and for that it needs POSIX.
Sure, it may try to create a sandboxed “jail” for these apps, but then the outcome would be like with MacOS: everyone would just write apps for that “jail” and “native Fuschia” would be irrelevant.
> The point behind Open Source is that "proprietary friction" pushes software writers into collaboration, and linux is successful because of that, not because of copyleft.Copyleft certainly helped. Lots of stuff in Linux was started as someone's proprietary work and then shared and merged. BSDs are losing such contributions every year (when SONY takes FreeBSD for PlayStation and adds some interesting features to it… what does FreeBSD receives back? nothing, obviously). This made big difference.
But that only worked when copyleft was mild enough for the companies to adopt that software in the first place. When GPLv3 “crossed the pain threshold” companies just stopped using such software so there are no advancements to share back.
> But copyleft doesn't wrok very well in this scenario, either, because it makes it hard for developers to monetise their work ...Indeed. But that's what GPLv3, ultimately, did. GPLv2 was mild enough that companies adopted GPLv2-licensed programs and then developers got some money. This doesn't often happen with GPLv3: companies prefer to adopt technically inferior alternative rather than deal with GPLv3. Developers are observing that and stop developing GPLv3 software. And then there are no copyleft software at all.