Comment by bikvfeee
3 days ago
To many of us it's not about the features which you obliquely refer to when you say "evolve" but about licensing. It's extremely concerning that we're replacing GPL stuff for non GPL, and just as concerning that so many folks don't recognise this point.
sudo is MIT-licensed: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md
sudo-rs is MIT-licensed: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/blob/main/...
Perhaps you are thinking of uutils? https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/LICENSE
That is the problem. MIT isn't GPL. In our new AI powered future, we want the source so we can fix it ourselves.
MIT is a source code license. If you have MIT licensed source code then you already have the source code and can fix it yourself. No different than GPL.
3 replies →
Sudo is already MIT. What are you concerned about here? Why hasn't it already happened?
Well, in the AI-powered future, you can reverse engineer and patch about anything without the source, too. That's not an argument against the GPL, but everything you can download is now effectively source-available for a modest fee to an inference provider.
> That is the problem. MIT isn't GPL. In our new AI powered future, we want the source so we can fix it ourselves.
GPL would be ideal, MIT is okay, but in our new AI-powered future, we may not even need the source code:
https://bramble-apps.github.io/
Maybe all software will become open source or free software?
This is by design.
They are slow-rolling the cancellation of Stallman's connection to the OS because their first attempt failed.
In 10 years, no one will have heard of GNU after all components have been replaced with corporate clones.
I find it hard to believe that all of this movement is because of Stallman. That seems so... petty.
GPLv3 is incompatible with embedded (Ubuntu Core) use cases
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Less Stallman and more the GPL. Companies hate it.
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Open source predates Stallman. His mental illnesses are a distraction from it, though.
Stallman is being canceled because an MIT licensed program (sudo) is being replaced with a different MIT licensed program (sudo-rs)?
Licensing is downstream of software existing. The person who actually writes software gets to make the license. If you want a GPL one you have to make that.
It already exists.
The default sudo (written in C) has an MIT license: https://www.sudo.ws/about/license/
Where is this GPL-licensed sudo that already exists?
Is it better?
Where…?
This conversation is very reminiscent of
"if you want people to use open chat protocols, you need to make user-friendly clients"
"we already have irssi"
the vast majority of people abandon IRC for discord
shocked Pikachu face from the free software community
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What is the GPL software that is being replaced?
Coreutils
We still maintain GNU Coreutils upstream, FWIW. I had to beg Canonical to address bug reports on the version that they distribute, which was ignored after the switch to uutils.
For that reason I suggest switching to any other distribution. Of the ones I have interacted with, I have had good experiences with all of them.
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Hardly relevant to TFA though
Maybe the GPL people need to get with the times, then. LLVM exists largely because the GCC people were so obstinate. I'm a big believer in copyleft software, but it only works if people want to use your software with their projects.
LLVM was supposed to be a virtual machine initially, hence the (original) name: Low-level virtual machine. The direction that it took, and especially the development of Clang: that was at least partially because of GCC's intentional anti-modularity.
LLVM was never meant to be a virtual machine, which is the reason why its name was ultimately changed. (It's closer to an instantiation of the C abstract machine, which is where the "virtual machine" came from.)
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Ref: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...