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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 10, 2021 12:30 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by pizza
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

> Equally inevitable is the failure of that ploy, because it does nothing to prevent the a bigger fish from taking your software and completely proprietizing it (making it more attractive to users by out-contributing you) or wrapping/bundling it as a service and completely undercutting your ability to monitize your own software.

If it's as inevitable as you say then why there are so many projects which don't support that fate and so few popular GPLv3 projects?

Actually you answered that question.

> Those that _contribute_ determine the direction software takes, and "the industry" massively out-contributes the "free software" crowd, so it's no surprise those contributions reflect the priorities (including the ethics) of "the industry"

Indeed — that's why you can pick APL/MIT and face the problems you outlined above. Risky and uncertain choice, yes. Or you may pick GPLv3 and guarantee the failure.

IanKelling class for GPLv3+ fork of uutils. Basically do what you say industry does to APL/MIT-licensed projects. But have any such GPLv3 fork succeeded? Ever? I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm really genuinely curious.

Because for now it looks as if choice of GPLv3 doesn't doom the project, but certainly hurts and if any GPLv3 ever succeeds it's because it's not just better than alternatives but better enough to overcome GPLv3 stigma.

GPLv3 fork of any permissively-licensed project can show that it's not true and we can learn on it's example about how GPLv3-software can win. But to do that we need at least one example of such a project.


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