I don’t understand how can they change the license of GNU Coreutils from GPL to non-GPL by only changing the programming language. Can someone explain it better?
this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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because new shiny things are more secure than proven things
Sudo had many vulnerabilities in past some of them unpached for years and it is bloated with unnecessary functionality that increases the attack surface. Doas is more secure and minimalist for example. Not an expert to say if Ubuntu approach is correct but I appreciate their effort.
i don't think sudo is perfect either but doas already exists, surely they could use that??
Ubuntu is a corporate/popular distro. It wouldn't make much sense to move to do as when it lacks much of the functionality of sudo and isnt in a memory safe language, which is Ubuntu's goal with replacing user space software with Rust.
Good.
Memory-Safe, Rust-Based and GPL-Free. 😂
Is that good or bad? What license are they using instead?
Edit: looks like they're using MIT, but I can't say I really understand the implications of that change
Basically, Expat-like licenses do not use the copyleft system: When you distribute a project that's copyleft licensed, you must give the exact same rights you were given (including the source code, license terms, etc). To resume this in 1 quote "the rights of one ends where the rights of the other begin"
It's generally not great as most non-GPL licenses allow for keeping changes from the public. GPL requires changes being made to GPL source to be released under GPL. Depending on the details some non-GPL licenses allow for creating closed source forks without releasing anything to the public. This is what allows Android OEMs to keep AOSP forks with changes that never see the light of day. In this day and age, seeing what we see with corporations corporating, we probably want more GPL than less. Maybe Rust coreutils are worth the tradeoff, I don't know.
Thank you for the explainer I appreciate it :)