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

Hakan Bayındır dijo [Thu, Jul 09, 2026 at 06:43:26PM +0300]:
>(...)
>Yes, writing forward-looking statements in a project page might not be
>technically wrong, and we should respect the choice. On the other hand,
>when people bring up their discomfort and highlight its dangers, those who
>do so command the same respect. Dismissing views and possible dangers is
>not the right thing to do here.

And lets note this is written, AIUI, in the uutils project page
(https://uutils.org/), _not_ in a Debian project page. Of course Debian
_might_ adopt it as a default at some point in the future. For all I know,
Debian might adopt a rewrite of the Linux kernel in PHP. It is not very
likely, or the future it forsees is very long-term...

>Let me put another forward-looking statement: Big Linux vendors might stop
>sharing source packages for their versions of uutils, and may even bake in
>DRM and/or “user-watching analytics” features into them to TiVoize their
>distributions, effectively making them non-free. This possibility bothers
>me. While I have nothing about the author(s) of uutils (I don’t know them
>to begin with), the possibility of this bothers me a lot. Do we want
>Debian to be one of these vendors, enabling this possibility? Where does
>it place Debian in relation to its motto, “The Universal Operating
>System”?
>
>Am I (or others putting this possibility forward) blowing this out of
>proportion, too?

This _could_ happen with some Linux vendors, yes. It cannot happen with
Debian, as long as Debian keeps committed to its Foundation Documents (SC
and DFSG). If Debian were to adopt uutils as default, and upstream were to
go rogue and relicense with a non-free licensing scheme, Debian would be
forced to either fork uutils or go back to coreutils — but as Debian is not
adopting uutils in the forseeable future, IMO this should worry us as much
as the dreaded PHP Linux rewrite.

 — Gunnar.