this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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What's with the move to MIT over AGPL for utilities? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 5 days ago by marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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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[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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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[–] Bogus5553@lemm.ee 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

MIT/GPL is fine for smaller tools.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

For small programs the FSF/GNU even suggests considering not using the GPL https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html

[–] Bogus5553@lemm.ee 5 points 5 days ago

Yes, and a cp or ls clone isn’t that meaningful to stick GPL to.

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah, specifically for something like coreutils I can't see the malicious endgame that is suggested by others here. Is the fear that a proprietary version of cat or pwd or printf takes over the ecosystem and then traps users into a nonfree agreement? Or a proprietary coreutils superset that offers some new tool and does the same thing? Or a proprietary coreutils that generates profit for businesses without attribution to the developers? What would stop anyone from just writing their own proprietary set of tools to do the same thing now, even if uutils didn't exist? Clearly not much, since uutils did exactly that (minus the proprietary bit).

I personally don't see a compelling reason to change to MIT, but I also don't see the problem.

[–] crystalwalrus@programming.dev 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

What's stopping people from doing that today is network effects. There are enough differences today between bsd coreutils and gnu coreutils that substituting one for the other doesn't work out of the box.

The chain of events that would cause a problem are: due to Ubuntu popularity rust MIT core utils overtakes gnu coreutils and people drop support for gnu coreutils, then a large and we'll funded corporate entity could privately fork rust coreutils and lock people in.

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 3 points 5 days ago

I'm with you until the lockin. How does that happen?

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[–] why@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 5 days ago (6 children)

I worked on an oss library with an MIT license and my colleagues told me they with that instead of GPL was with GPL it basically forces anyone who uses the library to make everything in their project available.

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[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (22 children)

Maybe there could be another reason why people choose MIT to begin with:

When you start a new repo on github it makes suggestions which license to use, and I bet many people can't be arsed to think about it and just accept what they're offered. [My memory is a little patchy since I very rarely use github anymore, but I definitely remember something like this.] And maybe github tends to suggest MIT.

That said, please undestand that many, many git platforms exist and there is no reason at all to choose one of the two that actually have the word git in them.

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[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 4 points 5 days 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 5 days ago (1 children)

Improvements would be upstreamed. Not with MIT

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 5 points 5 days 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.

[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 5 days ago

Yes, publication of the source is enough. However, you are correct and I should have worded it better. In practice, publishing the source allows the developers of the software to make improvements unhindered by licensing and other IP-based hindrances which are otherwise present in closed-source software

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