Jon Sterling on Nostr: Rewriting the GNU coreutils in Rust sounds fine. Rewriting it with an MIT license? ...

Rewriting the GNU coreutils in Rust sounds fine. Rewriting it with an MIT license? That's giving away the store.

This is one of those times when I think programmers and other technical people need to take stock of the social aspect of what they are doing—which is dismantling a monument to the social ownership and control of software.

Listen, I don't use (GNU/)Linux on my own machines; I use a proprietary operating system because my needs for hardware that doesn't suck completely dwarf all my other computing needs.

But free operating systems are an important part of social infrastructure, and although they have not been able to keep up with hardware advances, they provide an excellent way to *take back* old machines and breathe new life in them, while divesting from the corporate treadmill of "AI", subscription fees, and whatever else.

I think it is far more important that we OWN this infrastructure, bound permanently to the public good, bugs and all. It is a false decision, that we must choose between buggy and insecure software & social control of the software. A good-faith coreutils rewrite in Rust would have been GNU licensed.