Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

> I'd think such an absolute declaration as to the intents of the GPLv3 would be trivial to cite, as the whole drafting process was quite public

The whole thing was designed to fight tivoization. It wasn't the only reason to create GPLv3, but that was the main one. And the expected outcome was that hardware manufacturers would just make it possible to change the code on a device they sell.

But it was really quite naive to expect such an outcome in a world where the same hardware is sold to a different users at “differentiated prices”. Think Intel's CPUs or compare prices of TI-NSpire and TI-NSpire CAS (not only they have identical hardware, their sales rely on the inability of the buyer to tinker with their software… they are not doing all that good of a job ensuring that, actually, since they only need to claim that it's impossible to change the software, they don't need to make it actually impossible — but that stil absolutely precludes use of GPLv3 software).

FSF hoped to, basically, change the business models of many different industries, laws (that's very explicitly written there, look on section #3), the style in which governments operate — with very limited reward: the ability to use some software for free. No wonder the attempt backfired.

It was a gamble: we may change the rules under which the whole world operates or we would be kicked out of mainstream and relegated to tiny, insignificant niches. But GCC looked so entrenched, Linux was so popular… the die was cast. “Free software” lost.

Indeed. And since software replaces hardware more and more it becomes more and more important for the developers of hardware to stop unauthorized modifications. For market compliance and other reasons.

Indeed, that was pointed out to FSF many, many times during the GPLv3 drafting. And it was altered to accommodate some such uses (look for distinctions WRT to “User Product”, e.g. — it's there specifically to allow producers of industrial devices not intended to be used by “Joe Average” to be able to delived locked-down hardware to their customers who very expressly don't want the ability to change the code on a device with associated liability). But it was very obvious even back then that such cases would become more widespread, not less (heck, look on #3 “Protecting Users' Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law” again).

In a world where problems in software may lead to, at most, some papers being incorrectly printed GPLv3 may have been acceptable (yet, ironically enough, it was also not needed in such a world). In a world where software drives literally everything… it's unusable and ensures that end-users would never see your software.

Relying on software to fix hardware bugs is the norm novadays and it's much, much, MUCH simpler to rely on the locked down, signed, firmware instead on some nebulous schemes which may detect and alter modification of core system library (like libstdc++) and save the hardware anyway.

It's certainly nice that some niche industries may still afford to use GPLv3 and I really would be glad to read your article about that (no sarcasm here) but GPLv3 was expressly designed to make sure software under said license wouldn't be acceptable for many, many, MANY industries and thus would never reach the end users.

Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.