Forty years of GNU

Posted Sep 23, 2023 11:34 UTC (Sat) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Forty years of GNU by vadim
Parent article: Forty years of GNU

Where's the GNU answer to PowerShell, or to VS Code?

According to Wikipedia PowerShell is MIT licensed "(but the Windows component remains proprietary)", and Code-OSS and VSCodium is MIT-licensed, too. I.e., free software licenses. That's good enough. If you want a free version of "the Windows component" of PowerShell or the difference between VSCodium and VS Code, yes, AFAIK there is no GNU project for that. Apparently nobody has done that on their own and put it under the GNU umbrella, and GNU apparently spends its own limited resources on other projects.

In a way, the fact that large parts of PowerShell and VS Code are free software can be taken as success of free software. One may wonder whether this is a case of Microsoft doing the Embrace part of its Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy, but those of us who value free software can always stick with the released parts (if they care about that software at all; I am much too invested in bash and Emacs for that).

Likewise, if the redone-in-Rust software is free, why would GNU want to rewrite that? Sure, GPL (if enforced) would help against such software being taken proprietary, but proprietary extensions can be countered by copylefted extensions when the proprietary extension happens. And that would be a more effective use of limited resources.