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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Do you think it was disrespectful for the GNU project to reimplement the original tools in a different license than the original authors had written them in?

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AFAIK the GNU authors didn’t have access to the original source code because they were proprietary. I don’t know why this matters but it feels different in a purely “feels” way.

Yes and no; due to antitrust laws with AT&T, almost everyone had copies of UNIX source code, especially if you were near any universities (why does BSD still honor UC Berkeley on bootup, do you think?). Easy as pie to get; but extremely difficult to legally use without a license.

The question about whether Linux and GNU copied from the proprietary originals caused the famous SCO lawsuits. Even though this was proven false, there’s very little chance the originals weren’t used as reference in GNU.

Gotcha! I don’t, but that’s why I asked, I wasn’t sure if this was about any specific license or what.

I’m also curious about this: does that it’s in a different language make any difference here? Like I could also maybe see what you’re saying if these were also in C, but being in Rust, it’s not like they can literally copy the code, regardless. I know you’re talking about feelings and not hard and fast rules, but do you think that plays into any of the feelings at all?

Not really. I love Rust. It’s all I want to write these days.

My feelings stem from what I perceive as the degradation of the old school hacker ethos into a more corporate friendly environment. Especially during this time when the bigger companies are salivating at the mouth to replace SWEs with AI at the same time encouraging us to pick friendly licenses so they can take advantage of our volunteer work…

I didn’t mean that it was about Rust specifically, just that if a language change factored in.

Anyway, thanks for replying. It’s always interesting to hear how people think. I personally feel differently, but I’m sure it’s nothing you haven’t heard before. :)

The GNU authors almost certainly did have access to the AT&T UNIX source code, and they had to be reminded not to refer to UNIX source code when writing GNU replacements. GNU made intentional efforts to design their programs along completely different lines to avoid similarity to the originals. This is described at https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Reading-No... under "Referring to Proprietary Programs".

Were they also open source?

No. The original UNIX utilities were under proprietary licenses for an extremely long time, before eventually they broke free under BSD. The BSD tools are descendants of the originals and are also the versions used by macOS.

BSD wasn’t under an open license when GNU got started, so GNU reimplemented the proprietary UNIX utilities with their own enhancements and their own GPL license.

As such, complaining about the license is rich, considering GNU basically stole it themselves from the first round. And to this day, HN complaining about macOS’s utilities is also rich considering they are actually more standard and authentically UNIX than GNU.

MacOS's utilities are really just FreeBSD's with some patches.

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/text_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/system_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/adv_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/shell_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/misc_cmds

That is because Apple took entire FreeBSD 'userspace' as part of Mac OS X.

Legally, no, but plenty of people had copies of the source.

Their point was creating the 1st open source version was a good reason not to use the original license I thought.

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