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What would be an advantage of switching from GNU coreutils to BSD coreutils?

Doesn't GNU utils have more features?

Stability, readable code and unchanging flags.

GNU project code is infamously cluttered and hard to grok (mostly since it's a pretty old codebase and GNU has always favored having too many chefs in the kitchen over fewer, but competent, chefs).

FreeBSD code is also usually much more stable than the Linux counterparts; tends to be less buggy from my experience at least.

GNU also has gotten in the habit over the years of randomly shifting flags around for no real reason other than to make sure that they stay as the coreutils. They have the effective monopoly on usage (I want to say that BusyBox is the only realistic other competition due to how frequently it's used on smaller resource devices), so that way other implementers are forced to adapt. There's also have a tedency of making their software have really weird Unix pipe interop. The most infamous example I can think of is that there's one GNU coreutils command with the "human-readable" flag, which doesn't do what it usually does (adjust the output of commands displaying filesizes and the like to kb/mb/gb) but instead reformats the output to be usable in a different GNU command which also has a "human-readable" flag that works as expected.

There's a couple of reasons to not want to use the GNU coreutils specifically at least.

> GNU also has gotten in the habit over the years of randomly shifting flags around for no real reason other than to make sure that they stay as the coreutils.

Sounds like they've been studying the works of The Enemy ;)

> GNU also has gotten in the habit over the years of randomly shifting flags around for no real reason other than to make sure that they stay as the coreutils.

Do you have examples of this?

After some thinking, I do recall GNU Tar in I think the late '90s changed the bzip2 options a few times. Not sure the reasoning. Might be something in mailing lists but I don't really care to go digging.

> GNU project code is infamously cluttered and hard to grok (mostly since it's a pretty old codebase and GNU has always favored having too many chefs in the kitchen over fewer, but competent, chefs).

I was under the impression that it was a result of 1. supporting a terrifying spread of platforms - by the time the code handles the quirks of AIX, IRIX, Minix, Solaris, all the BSDs, and oh yeah also Linux, yes it has a rather lot of clutter, and 2. specifically implementing things in a different way than commercial UNIX™ so nobody could accuse them of copyright violation.

I had compared a couple of coreutils with their BSD counterparts for a personal project. Anecdotally, the BSD versions had much more readable code and less compiler/preprocessor black magic. Which also makes them easier to build with non-GNU toolchains (perhaps not out-of-the-box, but with less effort anyway). So, overall they would seem a better match for learning/diy purposes.

Poor choice of name though. Debian has a bsdutils package since forever [1].

[1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/bsdutils

I can think of a few

No copy-left license?

Compatibility on Linux with BSD-like operating systems such as FreeBSD, MacOS?

To annoy Richard Stallman?

copy-left licenses are better for users.

But BSD devs have their own argument https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/bsdl-gpl/

Yeah. Just look what they got from that. Big corps using their work with hardly any upstream contribution (Apple, Sony, etc). At this rate BSDs will be deader than dead within a few years.

Netcraft confirms it.

I don't know about you, but I can't eat code. That said, some people don't care about outside contributions or reuse, so I guess I find the pro-GPL partisanship more than a little misguided. Some people just have different goals, and that doesn't make them better or worse, just different.

And a project can't survive without the code.

And even then companies are famous for leeching on open source projects, with gpl you at least have some hope of companies leaving you alone or giving back something.

> And even then companies are famous for leeching on open source projects, with gpl you at least have some hope of companies leaving you alone or giving back something.

Especially when you make clear the option to dual license and let them use it under a MIT/BSD style license, or something custom, if they pay you an appropriate amount.

> leeching

How is it "leeching" if I deliberately release my source code under a BSD license because I don't care if other people use it or not? It can't be "leeching" if I don't care about their contributions either. The only other scenario that would apply is if I wanted to be paid for my work... in which case neither a BSD-like license, nor the GPL, would be adequate.

This is the problem I have with GPL partisans: They refuse to accept that projects can be completed, or that anyone can have any interests other than GPL-compatible ones.

Using a pet project nobody is expected to use as an example is a nil point, I could release a pet project in "WTFPL" or "Fuck You Nobody Is Allowed To Use" license and it wouldn't make a difference , if the concerns are that low for said project.

Monetization in FOSS is a systemic issue, with few exceptions, but even then you are far more likely that companies won't want to risk leeching with a GPL like license than a permissive one because of the code sharing requirement, which MIT/BSD at best only incentives as goodwill because of complexity maintaining the project they rely on.

I also find it funny you create a strawman, i never stated any adoration of GPL.

And that's the reason for their downfall.

> downfall

What downfall, exactly? If I want to get paid, the GPL doesn't help me with that. If I don't care about outside contributions, the GPL doesn't provide any advantage. Insofar as I have written something that is complete in itself then a BSD license makes perfect sense.

>Yeah. Just look what they got from that.

An absolute great OS?

>hardly any upstream contribution (Apple, Sony, etc)

Sony paid FreeBSD dev's, and the Apple kernel and coreutils are opensource, it's just they have not done anything FreeBSD is interested in, not like for example Netflix with in-kernel tls.

>At this rate BSDs will be deader than dead within a few years.

Yes yes you said that already 20 years ago, it's probably time to overthink it.

> Big corps using their work with hardly any upstream contribution (Apple, Sony, etc).

Meanwhile regular commits from / sponsored by Netflix, Dell-EMC Isilon, Juniper, Mellanox, Intel, Amazon and Microsoft (for network drivers), etc.

> No copy-left license?

Are you planning to make proprietary changes to `cat` you are unwilling to share?

> Compatibility ...

GNU coreutils work fine on all the mentioned plattforms

> To annoy Richard Stallman?

Not really sure if pettiness would be sufficient motivation for me, but then again, I'm writing this response...

GPL v3 is unsable for embedded/locked hardware, e.g. Macbook, Android phones. That's why Mac OS and Android dodged GPL v3 software.

How so? If Apple chose to distribute GNU cat, they'd need to release any modifications to cat under the GPL but the license's vitality would not "infect" the rest of OSX.

Plenty of GPL software is available on osx.

Available and used by Apple themselves are two very different things.

yes, Apple obviously hates GPL and wants it to die. But I'm confused what you're responding to. The claim was that GPL is unusable on OSX and that's obviously not the case. Whether Apple uses GPL is irrelevant to the matter at hand.

No. Apple don’t ship anything that is licensed under GPL v3 [0]. In fact, they are still shipping bash 3 (the last version under GPL v2) with Mac OS [1], released 16 years ago.

The decision is also affected by the Tivoization clause introduced to GPL v3.

> If MacOS included GPLv3 software, Apple wouldn't be able to pre-install it unless they provided all users with signing keys to install their own modified versions of the GPLv3 software on-target. Check out the GPLv3's "User Product" and "Installation Information" sections for more details - they're written in plain English, and are pretty clear. [2]

[0]: https://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20102563

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21819415

Apple doesn't ship bash with iOS, and you don't need signing keys to install modified versions of bash on macOS.

But Apple holds lots of patents[1], and while it's hard for me to imagine Apple enforcing patents against users of bash, I can easily imagine Apple lawyers making a strong enough case to management that the potential value of all patent licenses that would be implicitly granted by GPL 3 was likely to exceed the cost of feature-freezing or replacing affected macOS components that they would have agreed to a blanket ban.

Note that I'm not defending this decision: for the record, I detest software patents, dislike tivoization, and the only problem I have with GPL 3 is when companies that might otherwise contribute to GPL 3 projects are uncomfortable with it. Which is unfortunate, but certainly not a flaw in the license itself.

[1] https://patents.google.com/?assignee=%22Apple+Inc%22&oq=assi...

> Are you planning to make proprietary changes to `cat` you are unwilling to share?

Presenting to you Panthera(TM) - the Enterprise Ready cat that you were waiting for!

* LDAP support

* Office 365 integration

* SAP integration

* GDPR compliant outputs

* 24/7 SLA

Where do I sign my soul away to get this amazing software

Man, don't give them ideas. Have you seen systemd, pulseaudio and wayland ?

Could we call it GNU-free/Linux?

There's that whole issue of the kernel.

Although licensed under the GPLv2, the Linux kernel is emphatically not GNU software.

Some people call that Alpine.

People who don't know alpine does use gnu software.

Not by default. Unless I overlooked something.

The only GNU I'm aware of in Alpine is that they use gcc as the main compiler, but the built system is AFAIK GNU-free.

That's a subset; Alpine is a non-GNU Linux distro, but so are Android and Chimera (https://chimera-linux.org/).

Precisely; that would be a good reason!

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