Re: Concerning uniliateral decision making with respect to the coreutils package

On 7/5/26 9:08 PM, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:

> This site is not a Debian resource. Discussing it on debian-devel seems 
> moot.
> 
> As long as there is nothing actually happening in Debian, lets please 
> just close this discussion, without further moving goalposts and 
> accusing people.

I disagree for several reasons:

1. this (incorrect?) statement was issued by official member of Debian 
project [1] so we simply can't say that there is no impact (or relation) 
to Debian project.

2. many Linux news sites will happily take such statements as facts and 
spread them around Internet as already made decisions

3. switching essential part of system from GNU GPL to MIT license may 
have devastating consequences on Linux ecosystem - it will allow 
companies to make truly proprietary Linux distributions (MIT does not 
force them to release source code) and kill their clones (Ubuntu clones, 
or in case of RedHat: Alma, Rocky) once and forever (!)

4. making base system to depend on Rust allows few subjects to control 
what hardware will (or not)  run Linux. It is already endangering 
several Debian ports (forcing Rust dependency in APT that has no 
technical reasoning). Due Rust compiler/build complexity it is very 
unlikely that many less popular platforms will ever gain usable Rust 
support...

5. Additionally Apache/MIT licensing of Rust allows selling dedicated 
Rust compiler for proprietary hardware - effectively locking it from 
Open Source community access. GPLed GCC ensures that once someone is 
providing GCC binaries for proprietary platform it must provide also 
source code so community is able to fully access use and customize it.

So there is huge impact of switching to Rust coreutils in Debian - not 
just technical but also due license change. These things should be 
seriously considered before it is too late as it happened with switch to 
systemd - anybody remember that? - there was consensus that Debian 
should switch to systemd but also provide alternative init system - but 
later it was simply said it was too late to offer alternative - so now 
we have systemd only although it was not original intention. We should 
learn from that and avoid same fate when rushing to switch coreutils.

Best regards
  --Henryk Paluch

[1] https://nm.debian.org/person/sylvestre/