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Comment by bikvfeee | Hacker News Reader

To many of us it's not about the features which you obliquely refer to when you say "evolve" but about licensing. It's extremely concerning that we're replacing GPL stuff for non GPL, and just as concerning that so many folks don't recognise this point.

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sudo is MIT-licensed: https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo/blob/main/LICENSE.md

sudo-rs is MIT-licensed: https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/blob/main/...

Perhaps you are thinking of uutils? https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/LICENSE

That is the problem. MIT isn't GPL. In our new AI powered future, we want the source so we can fix it ourselves.

Well, in the AI-powered future, you can reverse engineer and patch about anything without the source, too. That's not an argument against the GPL, but everything you can download is now effectively source-available for a modest fee to an inference provider.

MIT is a source code license. If you have MIT licensed source code then you already have the source code and can fix it yourself. No different than GPL.

It is materially different to the GPL and inferior in all such ways.

I think it's time to recognize that copyleft as an idea is not great and LGPL makes the license even worse. I want licenses that don't have a core philosophy that attempts to overturn existing copyright.

Copyleft rocks. I want copyright overturned too.

I disagree on both points. The only difference is the lack of a requirement to share your changes under MIT. That makes it only inferior depending on your perspective. You are entirely allowed to feel it's inferior, but it's not FACTUALLY inferior, just different.

Thank you for explaining the difference between opinion and fact for me. Before you said anything I spent my whole life wandering adrift. Do you have any pointers on basic shapes while we’re at it?

Yes, my opinion is that a useless license is inferior to one that is useful. MIT permits taking without giving more so than the gpl. The point of my comment, you see, was to convey my strong opinion.

Many people do this, by the way: they just state something they believe without a disclaimer or preamble because in context, usually everyone in a conversation has a theory of mind sophisticated enough to discern opinion from fact, especially when someone is sharing their own private thoughts. Does this help? Good God the internet can be tedious.

> That is the problem. MIT isn't GPL. In our new AI powered future, we want the source so we can fix it ourselves.

GPL would be ideal, MIT is okay, but in our new AI-powered future, we may not even need the source code:

https://bramble-apps.github.io/

Maybe all software will become open source or free software?

Sudo is already MIT. What are you concerned about here? Why hasn't it already happened?

This is by design.

They are slow-rolling the cancellation of Stallman's connection to the OS because their first attempt failed.

In 10 years, no one will have heard of GNU after all components have been replaced with corporate clones.

I find it hard to believe that all of this movement is because of Stallman. That seems so... petty.

Less Stallman and more the GPL. Companies hate it.

I can see that. I've been part of a conversation where GPL is treated like the son of satan because it requires giving back and no one seems to agree on the scope or what the license actually demands. So legal goes apeshit and management shits bricks because they might have to share some code.

GPLv3 is incompatible with embedded (Ubuntu Core) use cases

no it isn't. Please don't spread FUD.

Open source predates Stallman. His mental illnesses are a distraction from it, though.

Stallman is being canceled because an MIT licensed program (sudo) is being replaced with a different MIT licensed program (sudo-rs)?

Maybe the GPL people need to get with the times, then. LLVM exists largely because the GCC people were so obstinate. I'm a big believer in copyleft software, but it only works if people want to use your software with their projects.

Ref: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...

LLVM was supposed to be a virtual machine initially, hence the (original) name: Low-level virtual machine. The direction that it took, and especially the development of Clang: that was at least partially because of GCC's intentional anti-modularity.

LLVM was never meant to be a virtual machine, which is the reason why its name was ultimately changed. (It's closer to an instantiation of the C abstract machine, which is where the "virtual machine" came from.)

AFAIK, being a flexible JIT compiler (for C-like languages, not Java) was a large part of the idea. The pivot to static compilation only happened "accidentally" in the first few years until the by then pretty broken JIT part was officially removed. Correct me if I'm wrong.

You're wrong. See e.g. https://llvm.org/pubs/2002-12-LattnerMSThesis.pdf, the original thesis proposing LLVM.

LLVM was always trying to pitch itself as a whole-lifetime optimization system. In practice, this meant focusing on LTO and PGO compilation modes. The idea of runtime or idle-time optimization were always kind of a next-todo step rather than anything actually implemented.

Licensing is downstream of software existing. The person who actually writes software gets to make the license. If you want a GPL one you have to make that.

It already exists.

Is it better?

Where…?

This conversation is very reminiscent of

"if you want people to use open chat protocols, you need to make user-friendly clients"

"we already have irssi"

the vast majority of people abandon IRC for discord

shocked Pikachu face from the free software community

It’s much worse: they created Matrix.

The default sudo (written in C) has an MIT license: https://www.sudo.ws/about/license/

Where is this GPL-licensed sudo that already exists?

What is the GPL software that is being replaced?

Coreutils

We still maintain GNU Coreutils upstream, FWIW. I had to beg Canonical to address bug reports on the version that they distribute, which was ignored after the switch to uutils.

For that reason I suggest switching to any other distribution. Of the ones I have interacted with, I have had good experiences with all of them.

Guix?

It has always seemed interesting to me, but I haven't gotten a chance to give it any substantial use, yet.

Hardly relevant to TFA though

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