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Comment by thewebguyd | Hacker News Reader

Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software and releasing under permissive licenses. Also why I'm not a fan of UUtils nor Canonical's early adoption of it in Ubuntu.

The intent here is extraction of all the value provided by copyleft projects without the obligation to give back. Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

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It is also rather ungrateful. The only reason we have Linux desktops today, and the only reason companies like Red Hat and Canonical has a billion dollar business model is the GPL.

The BSDs had a head start, and were superior in almost every way for the better part of a decade at least, but have remained niche compared to Linux. It's not even close. Now, there may be many other reasons to this, including the personalities and culture of the Linux developers, but you simply can't ignore the impact of the license which have kept all the commercial Linux products inside the fold.

I agree, I certainly can't comment on the legality of this license laundering but I would call them an asshole.

That’s explicitly not what’s happening with uutils; they have contributed fixes and test cases back to upstream

And just like that, it was forked by Microsoft a few days ago. Handed to them on a silver platter.

> Not a fan of this trend of "cleaning" GPL licensed software > Wether it's technically legal or not, it's disgusting behavior IMO.

GNU was originally developed to "clean" UNIX from the AT&T license.

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