Comment by beeflet
10 months ago
It's a cool idea but it's licensed MIT instead of GPL or something copyleft so I won't contribute to it.
Rust-only ecosystem would be pretty cool though. It may be worth just forking linux for the sake of compatibility, and keeping the license going. I don't see a future otherwise.
I'd also like to see better compiler diversity. Maybe once gccrs rolls around we will see different attitudes around rust emerge, compared to C/C++ which have more distributed development.
The Rust community does seem to be more focused on non-copyleft licenses, do you have any ideas why that is?
I’m not part of the Rust community, but I imagine it’s similar to Swift’s in that most of its members have day jobs as corporate devs.
Most of them at some point have been stung by finding a library that perfectly solves their problem, only to notice that it’s licensed GPLv3 (or similar) and thus the legal dept won’t let them touch it with a ten foot pole (and/or interfacing with that dept is not worth the bother). They’d rather not put others in that predicament and want their work to be useful to as wide of a spectrum of devs as possible.
nope, but I encounter it a lot. For example, the default cargo template or whatever just gives you a non-copyleft license https://github.com/cargo-generate/cargo-generate . There are a lot of questionable defaults in this space, like the ecosystem encouraging people to use a centralized repository like crates.io which requires github (now owned by microsoft).
I figure it's because the companies and orgs that started working with and investing in the rust ecosystem start by contributing to the compiler, which is non-copyleft and just try to extend that because it works to their advantage. You see this with a lot of languages/ecosystems with corporate sponsors, but also just because it gives you a unique selling point in an area where copyleft software dominates. Like, there will always be some company (like imagine a defense company) that absolutely refuses to publish all of their changes, so that represents a niche that can sustain smaller permissive projects.
I think that for an individual corporation, permissive is better and they won't make a decision to go copyleft unless forced. But for the ecosystem as a whole, GPL is better for business (especially when it comes to something like a kernel) because it forces companies to publicly fork over their drivers and collaborate, and reduces the competitive advantage vs companies that would otherwise not publish their changes if it was permissive.
That was probably too many words. Anyways, it would be nice to see some of this improved, i think it's a great language and will probably replace C++.
Speaking for myself, I want my code to be usable by everyone, including corporations, for free, with no limits. I even like to drop the attribution clause that things like MIT have.
Both copyleft and copyright (to a lesser extent) are in opposition to my beliefs and goals.
Copyleft licenses like the GPL don't place any limits or price on using the software, only on distribution - and the limits there are pretty reasonable and merely ensure the software stays usable for others with the same lack of limits in the future.
They are too young to have lived through SCO and Halloween documents.