I posted this over /r/StallmanWasRight and I am not sure it would be taken well at /r/Rust so here we are.
I have been getting into Rust in the last year but the licensing ecosystem of Rust crates makes me perplexed.
Today I came along this project https://github.com/uutils/coreutils that is trying to rewrite GNU coreutils in Rust and it is likely over the years projects like this one will overshadow many of the legacy GNU projects.
They are almost all made on “permissive” licenses that will give so much more power to corporations, in fact I am absolutely sure all these (big) rewrites are sponsored by corporations to escape the GNU safeguards that were built to protect users and society.
Does anyone else see this or am I just too paranoid ?
EDIT: It is not my intention to single out any specific project/team. Instead, I aim to initiate a meaningful discussion regarding the licensing choice. Rust is likely the first language since C that holds the capability to effectively replace the decades old, legacy libraries.
The community tends to favor more permissive licenses in general. I think a lot of it is due to a large amount of core libraries (often owned by members of the core team, in Rust nursery, or otherwise central to the ecosystem) using MIT or Apache 2.0, which means users who begin publishing their own libraries and know next to nothing about licenses will just follow suit.
I do wonder how it would hold up on court to basically clone something by rewriting it in a different programming language and then relicense it. I’m no lawyer though, I have little understanding of how these things work.
I believe that the US court has already rules that programming APIs are not copyrightable - only the implementation is. So a rewrite of something does not infringe on the original. Though proving you have not copied source from the original is harder - a clean room rewrite is generally preferred for such things (where the authors have not seen the original implementation ever before). I believe the google vs oracle lawsuits over java/openjdk was where the precedence was set. Though I am not a lawyer and could have gotten this wrong.
If cloning something by rewriting it would be an issue the GNU utils would have the same problem since they’re also just clones of proprietary Unix commands that the GNU project doesn’t own
But they (GNU) used the original Unix code to rewrite it or they did a clean implementation just cloning the behavior?
Edit: Cloning*