What an absolute shitshow
Rust-rewriting is a kind of madness. I like Rust, it’s an amazing language. But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.
The MIT license also is a concern. I understand that many projects use it, and we can’t just reject them because of the license. But here we don’t see an innovation under MIT license - we see a copy of existing GNU tools, with hilarious issues and a corporation-friendly license.
The fact uutils are being shipped despite being so raw shows that this is not about better software. The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.
And the quality level of uutils being already shipped tells they either make free alpha testers for the corpos of the users, or there were no competent programmers to take part in the development.
C will remain the core of the modern digital world for many years. It is impossible to rewrite everything to Rust in a couple of years. It needs a careful professional approach if we really want this to make software better. But in this case, no one does.
But why rewrite programs that existed for decades and have proven their stability and safety? Rewriting them to Rust won’t make them safer, it will just introduce the kind of issues original versions have got fixed long ago.
Of course rewriting them will introduce some new issues, but it will also eliminate classes of bugs from which there are definitely still a great many in old “stable” C code (bugs which are now being discovered and will presumably continue to be discovered at a much faster pace due to LLMs).
The whole project is about abolishing GPL. And Rust is just an excuse.
I don’t think it is just an excuse; I believe that improving security is also a goal… but removing GPL code is clearly also part of their motivation :(
Eliminating some obscure bugs from C code is not worth intruducing a lot of new bugs. GNU coreutils have been used and polished for so long, that it would be far more effective just to fix the issues as they reveal right in the original code. If rewriting removes one kind of bugs while introducing another - then what’s the whole point?
I cannot imagine obviously buggy code from 2020s being more secure than code that has been around since previous century. Again, even if Rust for real is a better solution for security reasons, the way it is being developed and shipped is not how one makes software more secure. Disregarding the license, uutils look like something pursuing hype, not strategical benefits.
But bruh, “if it compiles, it works”. Who needs testing now that we have blazing safe rust with AI?
“Ship fast and break things”, bruh.
That’s the sad point where the software industry is at these days.
In a few years people will be locked-in with some proprietary Linux distro variants made by big tech and they will wonder how that happened.
People show stop a moment and reflect on why the GNU license exists in the first place.
Seeing what bun did, maybe all of that C tooling is just a weekend with Claude away from being ported.
Not saying that is a good thing, I don’t support that, but what is stopping stupid people from doing that.
I just started a hobby project with Bun, it’s my first time trying it. I would like to know what you are referring to when you say “what Bun did”. Can you share more information?
He’s talking about Bun being completely rewritten from Zig to Rust by Claude after the project was acquired by Anthropic
Thanks, I didn’t know any of this.
This can’t be legally done with a GNU project, since this is a direct derivation. I also don’t know if bun is ok now and if it used to be before.
Holy crap.
The real shitshow is it’s MIT licensing. Corporate takeover 101
How is it a takeover, if they write their own set of tools?
The gnu brained folks hate when we make our own tools.
Square that circle for us?
Have you ever publish a tool that already has a gnu counterpart? Even if you say it’s for learning or an experiment you still get hounded about it.
Why publish an experiment?
It’s my git server, I can put what I want on it. MIT is easy when I don’t really have long term plans for it. If I am contributing to a GPL project i’ll use their license.
To get feedback? For fun?
I can see that, I guess even practicing deployment would be useful. There’s enough weird splintering in some projects that even perceived competition can seem like trouble.
I love rust, but I absolutely hate how it’s used to jam MIT licenses where GPL belongs. Maybe it’s time we consider using corpos tools against them, and use an AI to rewrite GNU utils to Rust, so that people can continue contributing to Rust while not feeding corps?
Edit: Though licensing AI software is iffy at best, you’ve got to own the copyright to something to licence it: Non-human productions are legally non-copyrightable. Also it might be better to just have humans do it anyway. The intent of my message was just that maybe we ought to deprive MIT-licensed projects from FOSS-motivated developers by providing Rust GPL alternatives to MIT/corporate Rust projects
Isn’t the MIT license independent of the choice of Rust?
Rust often ends up just being an excuse to rewrite software with corporate-friendly licenses without copyleft. That’s not necessarily true though, Lemmy itself is Rust & licenced under AGPL
You can use rust and still use the GPL.
My issue isn’t with Rust as a language at all, I quite enjoy making my projects with it. My issue is with “Rust rewrites” of GPL software, only to have those rewrites be licensed under MIT/Apache. To me it signifies that these rewrites were never about the safety features of Rust, but that they are attempts at pushing out the GPL
What an absolute shitshow
I’d say the month of June is actually a good time to be breaking and fixing things in a release that is due to come out in (checks notes) October.
I like staying up to date about open source but holy cow is there too many of these “omg they broke something in testing”. Yah, that’s the point.
No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release and definitely it should not have a break in something basic just because the language used to write the command break backword compatibilty
No, it is not a good time. A project like Ubuntu should now be in freeze as they had about 3 months before release
This bug was reported (and resolved by rolling back to the GNU coreutils version of
cp) on June 30, a little over 15 weeks prior to the scheduled release date.Which distros have a feature freeze that far in advance?
Ubuntu hasn’t even scheduled theirs for this release yet; if you edit that url to look at previous releases’ schedules you can see their feature freeze and debian import freezes are typically about 2 months prior to release. (See here for descriptions of all of the different types of freezes…)
The project hasn’t had a stable release, and yes, it does certainly need more testing to uncover edge cases.
Yes, MIT bad, but one must not diss on the project just because it has been written in Rust.
The problem isn’t the language. It’s the cargo cult that surrounds it.
I see what you did there
I disagree with MIT License being bad. I agree on all other fronts of your statements.
Why don’t you think the MIT license is bad?
Why do you think the MIT License is bad? I am not the one making the claim it being bad, so I’m not the on in defending position. It’s an open source license and I like to use it too (granted my work is just little small hobby tools). I think the MIT License has pros and cons, but isn’t straight a bad license in this context.
Because it isn’t a free software license. Software licensed by the MIT license can be copied and made into proprietary software. Since (I hope) we agree proprietary software should be minimised licensing under a free software license ensures big tech can’t make there own corporate software from it without ever giving back.
It IS free software license. It just gives the freedom to turn it into proprietary too, in which case the new proprietary product is no longer licensed under MIT. Which in turn does not violate the MIT being free, as it became a different thing.
No. I’m talking about the free software foundations definition of free software. The mit license is an open source licence, not a free software license.
Anyway, I’m interested as to why you don’t think the MIT license is worse than the GPL.
Its not about being bad or worse or better, its being different that grants different rights. MIT is more permissive, which you may like or may not. Some people don’t like GPL in example, because you cannot mix it with proprietary license. Or they want to keep a change secret, which is a right I would want to give. I’m not saying its better or worse, but I want to give the people the right to do what they want. This can lead to better or worse outcome.
Its only worse than GPL, if you want to enforce all modifications to be Open Source too.
I guess it makes coreutils vulnerable to EEE. Corps with significant stakes in Linux would be able to extend the API with proprietary functions, build ecosystems on top of that, and lock out independent development.
Imagine being unable to distribute a Linux based OS that is compatible with most of the world without proprietary age verification built in for example.
If its proprietary, then it can’t be distributed in an Open Source system anyway. We are free to use the Open Source version instead. I’m actually in favor of companies having the option to do what they want with the code, that is true Open Source in my opinion. In example a different distribution or even Microsoft takes the coreutils, and makes changes and then distributes it as proprietary software. We wouldn’t need to use it anyway.
Also which MIT Licensend software happened to this in our Linux eco system, that it became to a problem? Are there important examples?
The majority of project are MIT licensed and it’s not even close.
Im so happy work stopped using ubuntu server after last time.
Also how the heck do you break cp of all things.
I dont want to experiment with core utils.
Give me 10 minutes and I’ll write you a cp that is completely fucked.
cp $1 $2
cp of all things
cp might sound simple because its a very necessary thing for an OS to do, but there’s quite some technical depth to each of the core utils, if it were simple people would just be pumping out coreutil practice projects just like they do with “generic CRUD web app 5000”
I invite you to peruse the man page for cp.
That cp went really hard apparently!
People will blame Rust for the incompetence of Ubuntu team to adopt the uutils as default prematurely.
they broke something in testing. that’s not incompetence, that’s the whole point.
I will say the Rust stdlib seems to make TOCTOU bugs really easy to make for filesystem operations
But, yes, Ubuntu switching to a test project hurts it
