Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust [LWN.net]

Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 11, 2021 12:15 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust by khim
Parent article: Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

> 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.

This may have been the end result, but it is was not the "Expressly designed intent", as you yourself said in the very first sentence of your reply:

> 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.

(though that should be "continue to make it possible" -- manufacturers have to do considerably more work to create a locked-down device than not)

Anyway. In my experience (based on discussions with the last two $dayjobs' legal staff) it's not the anti-DRM clauses that made the GPLv3 a pariah -- that was a minor nuisance, easily worked around via technical means. The patent language, however, was the RealProblem(tm).

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Rewriting the GNU Coreutils in Rust

Posted Jun 11, 2021 12:36 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> though that should be "continue to make it possible" -- manufacturers have to do considerably more work to create a locked-down device than not

Locked-down devices predate not just GPLv3, not just the whole GNU project. They go back to early days of the IT industry. IBM sold features which would be unlocked (by installation of some SMS cards) back in 1950th, TROS modules in 1960th and so on.

Yes, it was relatively easy to circumvent these limitations (compared to RSA signature in modern devices) but that's not something people invented just to make FSF angry at them.

GPLv3 needs entirely new scheme, though: the one where you can change part of your base system software but not the whole thing.

That is certainly harder to achieve than full lock down of the whole thing.

> Anyway. In my experience (based on discussions with the last two $dayjobs' legal staff) it's not the anti-DRM clauses that made the GPLv3 a pariah -- that was a minor nuisance, easily worked around via technical means. The patent language, however, was the RealProblem(tm).

How is that substantially different from Apache license? It also includes the patent grant. And is loved by the industry.