Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 11, 2021 5:05 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
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.

The people who care about monetization were never using permissive licenses, are not now using GPLv3, and increasingly they're not even using AGPL. Instead, they're inventing their own proprietary fake-open-source licenses such as the SSPL or Commons Clause. As it turns out, "take somebody else's open source software and host it for a small fee" is an increasingly viable business model, and the Four Freedoms (particularly freedom 0) were specifically designed to allow people to do that sort of thing.

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 11, 2021 6:20 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

> The people who care about monetization were never using permissive licenses

Some are, typically those using an 'open core' business model.

> As it turns out, "take somebody else's open source software and host it for a small fee" is an increasingly viable business model, and the Four Freedoms (particularly freedom 0) were specifically designed to allow people to do that sort of thing.

Sure. Software where only the copyright holder is allowed to monetize it is quite clearly not free, as freedom from the tyranny of the copyright holder is one of the core ideas behind both free software and open source. That being said, if an oligopolistic megacorporation uses their superior economy of scale to crush anyone else, including the original creators, from hosting an open source app that's a problem too. I don't know what 'the solution' to this would look like, though it seems the lack of success of AGPL would suggest that increasingly stringent copyleft isn't it.