On Mon, Jul 13, 2026 at 12:16:46PM -0500, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Originally, one of the big appeals of GNU software is that it was *good
> software*, which was also copyleft. In fact, one of the original arguments
> for copyleft is that it would create a virtuous circle of development by
> forcing new work to also be free software. That was a quality argument. A
> lot of people started using that software because it was high quality and
> then got curious about how that was done and became believers in the
> underlying philosophical structure as well. GNU coreutils continues
> following this model to this day, and I think quite successfully.
I would agree with that. In fact, from a functional perspective,
uutils is (a) not fully backwards compatible with coreutils, so it
breaks various workloads (include some of Ubunti's), and (b) it's just
younger, and so it will have more bugs, including potentially some
security bugs. (Not all security bugs are caused by memory pointer
issues; there are also plain Logic failures that can happen regardless
of implementation langauge.)
So for those people who are feeling threatened by uutils because they
feel very strongly about strong copyright, in my opinion, don't need
to fret (yet), because in my opinion, coreutils is functionally and
technically superior.
I can't judge whether Ubuntu is using the "Rust is always better" as a
way of trying to supplant GPL code with an MIT license. But it does
seem that some people believe this to be trhe true motivation, not the
"uutils / sudo-rs" is more secue it's written in Rust" claimed
motivation. Personally, I don't think this is particularly relevant,
given the security and compatibility track record of both projects to
date. Maybe in a few years, but not today.
> There is no substitute for writing good software. Telling people to use
> worse software because it's copyleft will convince some people up to a
> certain point, but if the copyleft software is clearly inferior, well, the
> number of people who *only* care about using specifically copyleft
> software is, at least in my opinion, not that large.
I'll note that even Simon has said that he will use proprietary
software when the free software alternative is "not practical". That
basically begs the question of what is "practicality".
For me, the constant headache of device driver support and power
efficiency / battery life of Linux Laptops, not to mention having to
deal with changes in GNOME and KDE desktops, the Wayland transition,
etc., was enough that I've switched to using a Macbook Pro for my
laptop device. And then once I switched, I found all of the tiny way
in which the user experience is just more convenience (and for me,
"better") compared to using a Linux laptop.
So I would agree with Russ's contention that trying to use the "strong
copyright" is better as a decisive argument is probably not a great
idea from a rhetorical perspective. Sure, if all things are equal, I
suspect most people will very much agree that a strong copyright
license is better. But things are rarely fully equal, and so trying
to rely on it is self-defeating, IMHO.
- Ted
