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

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:56:47 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Salvo Tomaselli <[email protected]> writes:

>> Yes, clearly.
>
> There is one very simple way to make all these critics go away:
> relicense uutils to GPLv3.
>
> Until that happens those concerns are perfectly valid, and we've seen
> several popular projects become proprietary and do funny things with
> the license.
>
> Switching to GPLv3 would make all the concerns go away and focus the
> discussion to be purely technical.
>
> I don't think you can dismiss those concerns until then, they are
> completely possible.

+1

That projects uses non-copyleft licenses on re-implementations of
important (strongly) copyleft projects like Gcc, GnuPG, CoreUtils, tells
us something about the FOSS ecosystem.

How to attract funding for doing what you want to do is one of those
aspects.

Funding from organizations which are not aligned with the free software
movement.

Debian has historically been aligned with the free software movement,
but I fear the trend is to move further out on the slippery slope
towards the needs of commercial and government entitites.  This movement
is slow and incremental, and it requires some leadership to set out a
different path.

/Simon

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