alt Hacker NewsI does. The OP says "Linux" but means "Linux distros", which are made of thousands of "commingled" pieces (i.e. the licence of one piece does not affect the other).
Each piece that becomes MIT means less pressure on corporate users to give back any changes they make, and we'll end back up in the 1980s again where "Amazon Linux" is full of secret-sauce they refuse to publish and makes the base system incompatible with "Google Linux" (or whatever happens to be kicking about), creating deliberate lock-in out of a system that started open. In much the same way that macOS and FreeBSD are divergent today.
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bigstrat2003 • yesterday at 5:11 PM
That doesn't matter. Amazon or whoever can add as much secret sauce as they like; people can freely use the original so there's no issue.
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In theory there could be a the MIT version relicensed to GPL and this version could be carried as a standard if having MIT software as core utilities was considered enough of a threat - right? You just have to retain original license/attribution.
That would be an awfully awkward move in the realm of Linux-related politics but if having an MIT-licensed coreutils was such an existential thread, at least you can fix it with aggressive license moves and not code.