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...
That’s great, except they could already just use a permissively licensed implementation. This is in fact what a lot of companies already do. For instance, Android uses Toybox, macOS uses utilities originally ripped from NetBSD (mostly), etc.
Generally, a lot of companies also don’t contribute back fixes upstream. They’ll often just dump the code in some hidden away corner of their site as a giant source blob.
For something like coreutils, where a significant change is sort of unlikely in the first place, thinking the GPL makes a difference is bizarre to me.
That’s great, except they could already just use a permissively licensed implementation. This is in fact what a lot of companies already do. For instance, Android uses Toybox, macOS uses utilities originally ripped from NetBSD (mostly), etc.
Generally, a lot of companies also don’t contribute back fixes upstream. They’ll often just dump the code in some hidden away corner of their site as a giant source blob.
For something like coreutils, where a significant change is sort of unlikely in the first place, thinking the GPL makes a difference is bizarre to me.