Rust Coreutils & Reproducible Builds Receives Funding From The Sovereign Tech Fund

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Rust Coreutils & Reproducible Builds Receives Funding From The Sovereign Tech Fund

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues investing significant sums of money for important open-source projects. Among the latest projects receiving funding from the STF are the Rust-written Coreutils implementation and Reproducible Builds...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sovereign-Tech-Fund-Rust-uutils

[mxan]

No wonder the German government has no money, look at how much they're throwing away. Almost 100K euros into a Rust-written coreutils replacement that no one uses, fantastic, great investment, couldn't have been spent on anything else.

Also, gotta love how they gave a million euros to GNOME instead of KDE, when KDE is literally founded in Germany, and needed the money way more since GNOME gets so much corporate development already.

[anda_skoa]

No wonder the German government has no money, look at how much they're throwing away. Almost 100K euros into a Rust-written coreutils replacement that no one uses, fantastic, great investment, couldn't have been spent on anything else.

The budget of German accounts for expenses of roughly 500 billion Euros for 2024.
The 100k are 0,00002% of that.

Let's celebrate that governments have started investing into FOSS directly instead of hoping that companies would miraculously do it.

[Quackdoc]

Those are certainly some high numbers, though I wonder what the real reasoning is behind the choices it has made. I read the coreutils one and given below, this seems like quite the generic statement to warrent such a hefty donation

By rewriting critical components, specifically the GNU coreutils, in Rust—a memory-safe language—the project mitigates potential security risks associated with the use of the C programming language. This transition enhances the overall security, stability, and reliability of the modern operating system.

The initiative is significant because it minimizes the risk of exploitation on machines operating numerous public services. Additionally, the project has been able to attract more contributors by adopting Rust, a language gaining popularity among software engineers.

[cynic]

Let's celebrate that governments have started investing into FOSS directly instead of hoping that companies would miraculously do it.

indeed... all the FOSS we have has been funded by governments, not private companies, right?

[bug77]

Maybe this can serve as a reference to those that (still) think OSS costs nothing just because it's (mostly) available for free.

[hkupty]

No wonder the German government has no money, look at how much they're throwing away. Almost 100K euros into a Rust-written coreutils replacement that no one uses, fantastic, great investment, couldn't have been spent on anything else.

Many years ago, one of the arguments I heard for the existence of governments was that it is a viable way to fund for scientific research, as "evil capitalist companies" are not interested in progress and science. That it was only through government's broader and longer term vision that we would be getting the benefit of scientific advancement.

Now, I don't know nor I care if the Sovereign Tech Fund is part of the government or not, but the fact is that it is funding research. If it is government-associated, then I guess it is fulfilling its "long-term vision" obligations and granting that we get to learn whether it makes sense or not to use rust. If it is not part of the government, then it is private equity money and they put it where they think there will be some return.

The impact of _secure_ core utils in economy will far outweigh the investment of 100K EUR if those tools turn out to be a de-facto replacement, so it has a clear long-term benefit. Another benefit of this project is to bring uniformity between Linux, Mac OS, Unix and Windows, which can be an important factor in increasing productivity, thus making it an economically viable investment.

As a tech community, we need to stop thinking in terms of "basement home-office setup" when it comes to this kind of news..

[skeevy420]

Those are certainly some high numbers, though I wonder what the real reasoning is behind the choices it has made. I read the coreutils one and given below, this seems like quite the generic statement to warrent such a hefty donation

The DOD/NSA encourages developers to use languages like Rust for the exact reason you quoted (Here's the link). There are enough people in power that realize the importance of programming languages, operating systems, and even licensing in relation to state security, infrastructure stability, long term maintenance, and the legalities of how it's being used.

In regards to licensing, the elephant in the room that no one seems to address is that governments can't always hide state secrets while maintaining compliance with licenses like the GPL that require them to disclose any source modifications. Governments being accountable to their own laws is supposed to be one the cornerstones of free, democratic societies so it's important that they use software in ways that are legal. Them setting the precedent of "We do one thing while everyone else does it differently " is how unfree societies come about so you can't really blame a democratic government for encouraging the use of memory safe languages with extremely permissive licenses. Their job is to balance Free and Safe and, from a government's perspective, the MIT/BSD and Rust accomplishes those goals.

I really don't know what changes a tank, nuclear power plant or submarine, space station, or waste processing plants all need done to coreutils/uutils, but they might need something done differently that they don't want to share. What's the alternative? A GPLv4 system where the governments of the world get a free-use clause? Because that'll go over well with freedom rights advocates

[mirmirmir]

Those are certainly some high numbers, though I wonder what the real reasoning is behind the choices it has made. I read the coreutils one and given below, this seems like quite the generic statement to warrent such a hefty donation

Uh, uh...let me wrap my head with tinfoil.

The fund is actually from big tech companies as a long game to abolish gpl so they can leech Scott free.

Also, gotta love how they gave a million euros to GNOME instead of KDE, when KDE is literally founded in Germany, and needed the money way more since GNOME gets so much corporate development already.

Most sober kde fan from copium influence

[Steffo]

Also, gotta love how they gave a million euros to GNOME instead of KDE, when KDE is literally founded in Germany, and needed the money way more since GNOME gets so much corporate development already.

You know that KDE never applied to this program? So, who's fault is it?