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Comment by hk1337 | Hacker News Reader

Was there something wrong with how they are currently written or do they just want the badge that says they converted to Rust?

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Neither. They basically see Rust as the future. They want to be able to attract young contributors and to hire young employees who are excited about Rust and who want the safety features. Bear in mind, the average age of the Linux developer is increasing. They also see technical benefits in Rust. And they are increasing test coverage of both the Rust tools and the tools written in C, IIRC.

My source is this interview with the VP of Engineering at Canonical on this topic: https://corrode.dev/podcast/s05e05-canonical/

Interestingly enough, young developers have no issues writing C or C++ when it comes to game development, Pebble, Arduino or ESP-32 coding.

Those are more expensive!

Seriously doubt it, given that there is enough FOSS on those domains as well.

In reality, I think it much more about taking more control over parts of the ecosystem - the license change is part of it, but also getting rid of the old stubborn communities and maintainers.

Canonical hasn't contributed anything to GNU coreutils in the time since the switch was announced, just to be clear.

License. GNU is copyleft and the new thing is permissive.

We might see a fracture open slowly. For me, even AGPL is not enough

Once they have a more permissive license, cui bono?

Businesses.

There is a reason all FOSS OS alternatives for embedded systems like Zephyr, NuttX, FreeRTOS, IDF, Arduino,... are not GPL based, while Google has purged Android and ChromeOS from it, with the Linux kernel being the only GPL piece left.

> Arduino,... are not GPL based

Arduino is "just" repacked gcc in a nutshell, so it is GPL-based.

You need more than a compiler, so it is complicated, and not pure GPL,

https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...

I was only thinking about the software, yes. Also a lot of the "Arduino" libraries are not really owned by Arduino, even if they like to attach themself to it, so while it is true what they write about different licenses of the libraries, this what not what I considered to be part of Arduino itself. I was only thinking of the buildtools they release. While these are board specific, these are often "just" a fork of gcc, board-specific linker/image builders, a flasher and the Arduino-build system. Only the latter is what they actually created (arguable not even that: https://arduinohistory.github.io/).

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