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

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 20:32:20 +0200

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

I think we mostly have different opinions here, and I see little that is
technically right or wrong; it is just opinions.  Still:

Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:

> If you don't want people to use a non-copyleft alternative, may I suggest
> writing better software?

I think this may be were we think differently, and it could explain the
rest.

To me, I find free software more of a philosophical, political and
social choice than technical.

I use proprietary devices with proprietary software (e.g., macOS or iOS)
and by almost any metric any random person could think of, they are
"better".

Thus, to me the reason to prefer (strongly) copyleft software is not
about getting "better" software.

I think that if we don't have, and promote, strongly copyleft software,
we risk end up being subjugated by those who want to control my software
usage.  Through tivoization or some more modern method.

Therefor, I'll happily trade using less "better" software (such as a
GNU/Linux distribution) instead of, say, macOS since it makes me more in
control of my user freedom.  And if more people do this, we will be
resilient against subjugation techniques.

That's why I prefer using GCC over clang, GNU CoreUtils over UUtils,
GnuPG over Seqoia PGP, wget over curl, Mastodon over Twitter, Forgejo
over GitHub, Linux over BSD, etc.  Even if they are not "better".  I
would take all of the previous projects over proprietary software
shipped with Windows or macOS, though.  But sometimes even that is not
practical, and then I use Windows/macOS/iOS thinking I may learn
something that over time could help promote free software alternatives;
and contribute to MSYS2 or Homebrew.

/Simon

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