alt Hacker NewsIs anyone else worried that a lot of people coming from the Rust world contribute to free software and mindlessly slap on it MIT license because it's "the default license"? (Yes, I've had someone say this to me, no joke)
GnuPG for all its flaws has a copyleft license (GPL3) making it difficult to "embrace extend extinguish". If you replace it with a project that becomes more successful but has a less protective (for users) license, "we the people" might lose control of it.
Not everything in software is about features.
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You are attributing a general trend to a particular language community. I also believe that you are unjustifiably unfairly interpreting “default license” just because you disagree with what they think the “default license” is. We all know what is means by this. It just sounds like you think it should be something GPL
I find that this is something reflective of most modern language ecosystems, not just Rust. I actually first started noticing the pervasiveness of MIT on npm.
For me, I am of two minds. On one hand, the fact that billion-dollar empires are built on top of what is essentially unpaid volunteer work does rankle and makes me much more appreciative of copyleft.
On the other hand, most of my hobbyist programming work has continued to be released under some form of permissive license, and this is more of a reality of the fact that I work in ecosystems where use of the GPL isn't merely inconvenient, but legally impossible, and the pragmatism of permissive licenses win out.
I do wish that weak copyleft like the Mozilla Public License had caught on as a sort of middle ground, but it seems like those licenses are rare enough to where their use would invite as much scrutiny as the GPL, even if it was technically allowed. Perhaps the FSF could have advocated more strongly for weak copyleft in area where GPL was legally barred, but I suppose they were too busy not closing the network hole in the GPLv3 to bother.
Well then the software needs to have its bugs fixed if it wants to have a chance at longer term survival.
I think that's a feature not a bug for upstream projects encouraging these rewrites.
GnuPG should be extended (incrementally rewritten into something much better and turned into a library) and the original GnuPG should be extinguished.
No. You can always take the MIT-licensed source. And GnuPG got used through a CLI “API” anyway.
I'm not worried it might be the case. I'm certain that ubuntu and everyone else replacing gnu stuff with rust MIT stuff is done with the sole purpose of getting rid of copyleft components.
If the new components were GPL licensed there would be less opposition, but we just get called names and our opinions discarded. After all such companies have more effective marketing departments.
> Is anyone else worried that [...] the Rust world [...] slap on it MIT license because it's [reason you don't like]?
No... I don't think that's how software works. Do you have an example of that happening? Has any foss project lost control of the "best" version of some software?
> Not everything in software is about features.
I mean, I would happily make the argument that the ability to use code however I want without needing to give you, (the people,) permission to use my work without following my rules a feature. But then, stopping someone from using something in a way you don't like, is just another feature of GPL software too, is it not?
Not really, gpg isn't something worth losing.
The vast majority of open-source software is written by people whose day job is building empires on top other open-source software, at zero cost and without releasing modifications, which is harder to do with the GPL.
> Is anyone else worried that a lot of people coming from the Rust world contribute to free software and mindlessly slap on it MIT license
Yeah; I actually used to do that to (use the "default license"), but eventually came to the same realisation and have been moving all my projects to full copyleft.