Uutils 0.0.24 Advances Rust-Written Coreutils Implementation

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Uutils 0.0.24 Advances Rust-Written Coreutils Implementation

The uutils project providing a Rust-written Coreutils re-implementation has released v0.0.24 and it passes another 29 GNU test cases as the project nears its 1.0 release...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/uutils-0.0.24-Rust-Coreutils

[PyroDevil]

GNU uutils? They are licensed under MIT.

[wswartzendruber]

It's a nice, peaceful morning here in Boise, Idaho. The air is cool and quiet, but a red twilight is emerging over the eastern horizon.

[unixpoet]

GNU uutils? They are licensed under MIT.

Right? The entire point of the GNU coreutils is that they're protected by copyleft. So many new projects are using MIT or similar licenses, and yet people lament corporate influence on open source with a surprised pikachu face.

[pabloski]

Right? The entire point of the GNU coreutils is that they're protected by copyleft. So many new projects are using MIT or similar licenses, and yet people lament corporate influence on open source with a surprised pikachu face.

this has been going on since the war between GPL and BSD fanboys

the real problem is that the BSD fanboys don't even want to acknowledge that their license gives corporations the right to steal...heck the PS4 is an AMD machine with an AMD graphic card, yet where is the driver source code? no, FreeBSD is forced to steal them from the GPL licensed Linux kernel!!

[skeevy420]

this has been going on since the war between GPL and BSD fanboys

the real problem is that the BSD fanboys don't even want to acknowledge that their license gives corporations the right to steal...heck the PS4 is an AMD machine with an AMD graphic card, yet where is the driver source code? no, FreeBSD is forced to steal them from the GPL licensed Linux kernel!!

Except a not significant portion of the Linux kernel isn't GPL like those AMD graphics drivers that the BSD folks are supposedly stealing. The Linux kernel has license exceptions that basically act as a GPL Loophole. They allow Linux and GNU fanboys to say the kernel is GPL while simultaneously ignoring that very important parts are licensed under BSD and MIT licenses, intentionally licensed as NOT GPL, so they can be used by other kernels and operating systems.

AMD does it to share their driver between Linux, Windows, the BSDs, and any other OS with an MIT compatible license or an MIT license exception. The GPL is "Non-Free Open Source" while MIT and BSD are "Free Open Source". One enforces restrictions and limitations while the other can be used freely without limitations; non-free and free.

[dlq84]

this has been going on since the war between GPL and BSD fanboys

the real problem is that the BSD fanboys don't even want to acknowledge that their license gives corporations the right to steal...heck the PS4 is an AMD machine with an AMD graphic card, yet where is the driver source code? no, FreeBSD is forced to steal them from the GPL licensed Linux kernel!!

How is it stealing when there's explicit consent in the license, what happened to words meanings?

[pabloski]

Except a not significant portion of the Linux kernel isn't GPL like those AMD graphics drivers that the BSD folks are supposedly stealing.

This is irrelevant. The point is that Sony is using BSD code, glueing it with proprietary AMD drivers and giving ZERO back to the community. The community here is clearly the only loser.

AMD does it to share their driver between Linux, Windows, the BSDs, and any other OS with an MIT compatible license or an MIT license exception. The GPL is "Non-Free Open Source" while MIT and BSD are "Free Open Source". One enforces restrictions and limitations while the other can be used freely without limitations; non-free and free.

Do you really believe the uber-optimized and battle tested PS4 AMD GPU driver is the same used in Linux, FreeBSD, etc...? The qualitative level is clearly much different. So the free software community loses, while the corporations get things for free. Heck, Microsoft and Apple have built empires using software valued at billion dollars ( Linux kernel, for example, is estimated at 10 billion dollars!!! ) and making money from them, investing pennies.

[pabloski]

How is it stealing when there's explicit consent in the license, what happened to words meanings?

Oh legalese, great! Are you happy that the BSD community works for free and the big corps make billions selling their software?

[stargeizer]

The Kernel drivers, are GPL. These "drivers" are mostly memory management code and command processing to the card. The MESA drivers *ARE* MIT licensed, since MESA ITSELF is MIT licensed. So nobody steals anything from anyone in this case.

GPL is only restrcitive to those people that wants to close the code and get money from it. From the rest of the world is still the best decision, if you care about your work. If you really don't care, MIT or APACHE are really good licensing: "I don't owe nothing to you , you don't owe nothing to me, use to whatever you want". For experience, closed code is quite close to crap nowadays, since there are dealines to the work, and noboady cares about quality on closed systems, just the bare minimum to get things "work". (Granted, there's always some open projects that do the same, but it's not so obvious until the next code crash)

Now the problem with this version of Coreutils, is that takes GPL code and gets rewritten in Rust, and since it's rewritten the guy doing the port changes the license. That's quite unethical (If you do a port of a closed code in another language, and then change the license and distribute it, do you really think you can get away with it??), but in the end, Coders rarely do ethics things in Real Life. They do for the money or the fun, or both. And of course, this attracts the attention of all kind of vermin out there, but then again, their choice.

And about the BSD being robbed, sorry, is not. They offer the code for free, use whatever you want, close it if you want, just mention in some file that you use the code. That's all. and that's not stealing.

But if you talk about porting GPL code to another language, and relicensing it, that's a grey area, and only a court can judge in that case. And that's will open a really nasty can of worms in case somevbody sues.