This is a follow-up to Jon’s original post on Carefully (but purposefully) oxidising Ubuntu and Julian’s migration spec for 25.10. We promised transparency throughout this process, and this post is written in that spirit. What happened after the announcement Following the decision to adopt rust-coreutils, we got to work. Any package shipped by default in Ubuntu must be promoted to Ubuntu Main, which requires passing a thorough security review. We quickly assembled an internal team spanning Ubun...
The “completely random person with no relevance to the project” specifically in reference to uutils-coreutils, but I will stand on the assessment for every other rust/mit rewrite of a c/gpl package, is in every instance a contributor, maintainer or user of the gpl package it’s based on and therefore neither random or irrelevant.
There are constantly random people complaining who literally have never been involved with GNU coreutils (or frankly any GNU project at all) or uutils. If all the people complaining worked on GNU projects, they’d have a truly astounding supply of contributors.
They are always people saying “hey, we wanna help but your license is standing in the way, why not change it so we can more easily work together?” Or “this project is great but the license is too permissive, since the thing it’s based on got by great with gpl, couldn’t the license be changed to gpl?”
People say this in the other direction as well.
Forking over license would be counterproductive and silly when the thing in question is a reimplementation of a gpl package. Literally just use the license that the original work had!
From my perspective the people asking rust/MIT rewrites of gpl/c stuff to go back to gpl are being perfectly reasonable and have every possible definition of standing to make that request and always get treated as interlopers.
I suppose you complain about this when the BSD folks reimplement functionality present in Linux or other GPL projects. To put it bluntly, uutils isn’t GNU coreutils. It’s an implementation of the utilities trying to get as close as possible to the same functionality, but it will likely never truly “replace” GNU coreutils (as long as the latter is still being developed, at least).
We havent even touched on the violation of the gpl aspect, where no programmer and certainly not one using a llm could be reasonably thought to be ignorant of the gpl coreutils inner workings and doing a clean room implementation which is what is legally required to not be considered a derivative work!
This is completely ridiculous. How does “no programmer … could be reasonably thought to be ignorant of the gpl coreutils inner workings” even make sense to you? Under this thought process, it’s impossible to make a clean room implementation at all because you cannot be “ignorant of the [XYZ project] inner workings” if you implement the same functionality. I suppose all the BSDs are in violation of the GPL since they have implemented roughly the same functionality. Not to mention Toybox.
Lol I guess everyone who uses Linux and has contributed absolutely nothing to the kernel should be taken quite seriously when they drive-by on the kernel mailing list and start complaining about the management of the project.
So open source is only for people who already in the club then? Who gets to have a say? What are the restrictions on that say?
MIT defenders are laveyian satanists until someone has an opinion they disagree with lol.
I’m genuinely astounded that a recurring argument for simply dismissing suggestions to change the license to the one the original project had is “that’s my purse, I don’t know you!”
I could understand where you’re coming from if the people were, to a man, rude and demanding. Having read lots of threads about rust/mit rewrites of c/gpl stuff and participated in several, they’re pretty often just like me: politely presenting a perfectly reasonable argument even when met with very defensive pushback.
The requirements are not at all strict. Submit even one bug report or issue, or do literally anything positive rather than show up for the first time and whine about the management of the project or whatever out of nowhere and then maybe people will take your opinion more seriously.
The threads are indeed filled with people like you given that in a number of your posts you went and complained about Rust as a whole. This is ignoring that the other highly upvoted (license-related) top-level post in this very thread (before it got deleted by mods) called the project maintainers cucks and so on.
Wow, where are those requirements published? I’m sure more people would follow the rules of the project if it were made clear that input is contingent upon some existing level of community involvement…
Of course, I have never seen such rules put in place except to exclude the most base mlm scam spammers on mailing lists, but that’s neither here nor there.
Shouldn’t my obvious willingness to engage with people about this topic serve as some sort of indicator that I’m serious and not “drive by”?
Shouldn’t the fact that I’m not being rude or crass like the other poster you brought up (to achieve rhetorical ends I’m not exactly clear on!) be an indicator that my input should be taken seriously?
Shouldn’t my obvious willingness to engage with people about this topic serve as some sort of indicator that I’m serious and not “drive by”?
Shouldn’t the fact that I’m not being rude or crass like the other poster you brought up (to achieve rhetorical ends I’m not exactly clear on!) be an indicator that my input should be taken seriously?
Given that you replied quite positively to the dude who wrote about the maintainers being “cucks” and keep talking about the “perverse incentives of rust,” the answer is no.
There are constantly random people complaining who literally have never been involved with GNU coreutils (or frankly any GNU project at all) or uutils. If all the people complaining worked on GNU projects, they’d have a truly astounding supply of contributors.
People say this in the other direction as well.
I suppose you complain about this when the BSD folks reimplement functionality present in Linux or other GPL projects. To put it bluntly, uutils isn’t GNU coreutils. It’s an implementation of the utilities trying to get as close as possible to the same functionality, but it will likely never truly “replace” GNU coreutils (as long as the latter is still being developed, at least).
This is completely ridiculous. How does “no programmer … could be reasonably thought to be ignorant of the gpl coreutils inner workings” even make sense to you? Under this thought process, it’s impossible to make a clean room implementation at all because you cannot be “ignorant of the [XYZ project] inner workings” if you implement the same functionality. I suppose all the BSDs are in violation of the GPL since they have implemented roughly the same functionality. Not to mention Toybox.
lol at “users don’t count”
Lol I guess everyone who uses Linux and has contributed absolutely nothing to the kernel should be taken quite seriously when they drive-by on the kernel mailing list and start complaining about the management of the project.
Yes.
Open source is more than code, it’s software for everyone including non programmers.
You don’t need to be a programmer to contribute. That’s just your bias. Anyway, I’m done with this.
So open source is only for people who already in the club then? Who gets to have a say? What are the restrictions on that say?
MIT defenders are laveyian satanists until someone has an opinion they disagree with lol.
I’m genuinely astounded that a recurring argument for simply dismissing suggestions to change the license to the one the original project had is “that’s my purse, I don’t know you!”
I could understand where you’re coming from if the people were, to a man, rude and demanding. Having read lots of threads about rust/mit rewrites of c/gpl stuff and participated in several, they’re pretty often just like me: politely presenting a perfectly reasonable argument even when met with very defensive pushback.
The requirements are not at all strict. Submit even one bug report or issue, or do literally anything positive rather than show up for the first time and whine about the management of the project or whatever out of nowhere and then maybe people will take your opinion more seriously.
The threads are indeed filled with people like you given that in a number of your posts you went and complained about Rust as a whole. This is ignoring that the other highly upvoted (license-related) top-level post in this very thread (before it got deleted by mods) called the project maintainers cucks and so on.
Anyway, now I’m actually done.
Wow, where are those requirements published? I’m sure more people would follow the rules of the project if it were made clear that input is contingent upon some existing level of community involvement…
Of course, I have never seen such rules put in place except to exclude the most base mlm scam spammers on mailing lists, but that’s neither here nor there.
Shouldn’t my obvious willingness to engage with people about this topic serve as some sort of indicator that I’m serious and not “drive by”?
Shouldn’t the fact that I’m not being rude or crass like the other poster you brought up (to achieve rhetorical ends I’m not exactly clear on!) be an indicator that my input should be taken seriously?
Given that you replied quite positively to the dude who wrote about the maintainers being “cucks” and keep talking about the “perverse incentives of rust,” the answer is no.
I’m going to block you now, byebye.