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

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:54:40 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Ansgar 🙀 <[email protected]> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 2026-07-13 at 10:57 +0300, Hakan Bayındır wrote:
>> So, keeping all levels Free (not only Open) is a worthy goal in my eyes. 
>> Even if there are other popular alternatives.
>
> I'm happy to inform you that the uutils license is a Free and Open
> source license according to both FSF and Debian. So no problem here.

Right - although I think the intention could have been to say "strongly
copyleft" and not "Free".

I believe that having a (largely) strongly copyleft OS is part of a
defence against commercial/government subjugations.

Replacing strongly copyleft software with permissively licensed software
leads towards a different path, and with OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD around I
don't believe Debian should compete with that.  I fear there could even
be a majority among voting DD's who believe the opposite today, though.
That's part of why we are seeing these efforts to replace GnuPG with
Seqoia, CoreUtils with UUtils, wget with (w)curl, and so on for
generally anything GNU-licensed with anything BSD/Expat-licensed.

> Note that the FSF sadly also pushes non-free licenses for documentation
> and highly unpractical ones for other purposes (AGPL) that practically
> only sees adoption for dual-licensed software (AGPL + Proprietary) to
> make the AGPL version a "shareware" or "demo" version that is nearly
> impossible to use (e.g., Oracle's BerkeleyDB which most open source
> distributions seem to have stopped using as a result of the AGPL
> license).

I think the way to understand this is that the FSF and Debian positions
on demanding free licensing for non-software differs.  I think both
approaches are reasonable, but/and lead to different consequences.

My perception is that there is a lot of AGPL licensed software around,
without any open-core dual-licensing setups.  Mastodon for example.

> There's also the not helpful GPL-2 vs GPL-3 schism which could probably
> by largely fixed by a GPL-2-compatible GPL-4 (at least for GPL-3-or-
> later software).
>
> Note that the GPL-3 also pushed many to use non-copyleft licenses like
> MIT or Apache-2. A GPL-2-compatible GPL-4 might bring more people back
> to copyleft licensing, but the FSF seems to care too much.

How would that even work?

The GPL2-incompatibility in GPL3 is largely because GPL3 defends against
more freedom problems than GPL2 do.  If those things were to be relaxed,
there wouldn't be any point of moving to GPL3 in the first place.

So I think the FSF do care about this issue, and decided to prevent
tivoization, read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

/Simon
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 1.2 KB)