I assume this is in reference to the rust coreutils being MIT-licensed. How would using GPL benefit them?
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Improvements would be upstreamed. Not with MIT
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.
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.
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?
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.
Does anyone use MPL anymore? Is it a decent middle ground or the worst of both worlds?