this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025

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136

What's with the move to MIT over AGPL for utilities? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 months ago by marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/linux@lemmy.ml

133 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don't see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It's like they're painting their faces with "here, take my stuff and don't contribute anything back, that's totally fine"

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I assume this is in reference to the rust coreutils being MIT-licensed. How would using GPL benefit them?

[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Improvements would be upstreamed. Not with MIT

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

GPL would not require that. It would only require publication of the source. There is no requirement to give back or even make your changes compatible with upstream.

[–] unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

True.

Though, you are probably going to have a much easier time implementing a change to your code that is present in a company's published code, than you would trying to reverse-engineer a binary.

Sharing of the code I would consider "giving back" in it of itself.

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[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.

Why do they?

They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.

Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.

How do we explain that?

There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.

Why not?

Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.

How about OpenSSH?

It is MiT licensed. Should somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?

Why haven’t they?

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[–] lengau@midwest.social 4 points 3 months ago

Canonical still licenses most of their stuff under GPL3, including new stuff. The license (other than it being open) was probably not even a consideration in deciding to experiment with uutils.

[–] Grappling7155@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Does anyone use MPL anymore? Is it a decent middle ground or the worst of both worlds?

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