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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

It's not for the sake of it - it's to have MIT-licensed (able to be propriotized) coreutils. GPL is a thorn in the side to anyone who wishes to EEE it.

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This is far from OK. Entire point is to have GPL not to run away from it. Again canonical shows they didn't get the point. Anyway Im staying on gnu coreutils as i see no benefit and zero reason for switch.

That isn't the motivation. It's about "resilience, performance and maintainability".

I doubt they'll get noticeably better performance (the main GNU tools are already very optimised). I'm not sure they really lack in resilience. And I don't think memory safety is a big factor here.

Maintenance is definitely a big plus though. It will be much nicer to work on modern Rust code than ancient C.

If you look a bit deeper, this project actually cares deeply about its license, and is going out of its way to choose the license it is using, ignore complaints, and avoid ending up GPL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qTyyMyU2hQ

In an interview with FOSS Weekly, Sylvestre Ledru (the main developer, who curiously has a background working on Debian and Firefox, before ending up getting seduced by the clang/LLVM ecosystem), firmly states "it is not about security".

To clarify, you think the obvious benefit that is something several organizations obviously want isn't the motivation, but improvements to 3 things that probably won't be improved are the real motivations?

How much maintenance do the tools need currently, and how does it compare to the effort?

i am surprised by the implication

toybox and the BSDs already exist for those wanting permissively licensed utilities, the GPL is not a major motivator.

They do, but they're minimal versions, not one-for-one compatible with the GNU versions.

Every proprietary Linux OS (such as most Android phones) uses busybox, at a slight disadvantage to them, because they can't handle using GPL3 coreutils. Now they'll use the MIT-licensed drop-in replacement coreutils.

Yeah because non GPL coreutils don't exist.

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