Rust 👍
MIT instead of GPL 👎1000%
Precisely. The Rust community should stop using pushover licenses.
Eh, I don’t see the issue here. The MIT license is fine for a few reasons:
- attractive to lots of FOSS projects, like BSDs, Redox, etc
- no incentive to embed into proprietary projects - ls, cp, etc aren’t particularly interesting to embed, and functionality is usually better in the stdlib of whatever language you’re using
- increases appeal generally for research purposes
I really don’t see much benefit of GPL here. It makes sense for larger works with interesting snippets of code, but not for small, one-off tools like this.
If the other projects are licensed with a GPL, there is no issue doing any of these things (except using them for proprietary purposes later), which is the point. If you licensed your project incorrectly, that isn’t the GPL-licensed project’s fault.
If you licensed your project incorrectly
If you think other people disagreeing with you on how to license their own work is “incorrect” maybe you are the one not really in favor of freedom.
GPL is more freedom for users and developers. MIT is less freedom for users because it grants more “freedom” for some company to exploit the developer’s labor by taking it to make something proprietary with it.
If you want to use GPL code, pushover licenses are incorrect because they protect the user and developer from this nonsense.
GPL is just as bad as proprietary licenses in the sense that GPL makes the user worry about the licensing of some library they just want to use. MIT, BSD,… give the code user the freedom to avoid worrying about licensing bullshit. GPL meanwhile doesn’t really solve any of the problems you claim it solves because all it does is duplicate effort and the non-GPL duplicate is used in a lot of places where a single copy of the code could be used if the GPL-using author hadn’t stubbornly insisted on a disproven theory of how GPL will save us.
The original CoreUtils have beenvetted through decades of use. They have been broken and fixed many times, and they have been hardened against so many edge cases, it’s not funny anymore. That’s where those 600 tests come from (mostly). Once they have brought the Rust tools to that level, how much performance advantage will there be left?
