I posted this over /r/StallmanWasRight and I am not sure it would be taken well at /r/Rust so here we are.
I have been getting into Rust in the last year but the licensing ecosystem of Rust crates makes me perplexed.
Today I came along this project https://github.com/uutils/coreutils that is trying to rewrite GNU coreutils in Rust and it is likely over the years projects like this one will overshadow many of the legacy GNU projects.
They are almost all made on "permissive" licenses that will give so much more power to corporations, in fact I am absolutely sure all these (big) rewrites are sponsored by corporations to escape the GNU safeguards that were built to protect users and society.
Does anyone else see this or am I just too paranoid ?
EDIT: It is not my intention to single out any specific project/team. Instead, I aim to initiate a meaningful discussion regarding the licensing choice. Rust is likely the first language since C that holds the capability to effectively replace the decades old, legacy libraries.
I don't think there's a hidden conspiracy behind projects such as this one; it may be just that it's simply much easier for projects with permissive licenses to take off as corporations and private entities are willing to sometimes submit patches and contribute to these projects on the side while sponsoring the developers with money. However, it's still definitely not proportionate to the value that the community contributes back and basically gives to the corporations for free with most of them packaging these libraries and binaries and selling their software for much higher profit without ever contributing anything back. There is a reason why these permissive licenses are called the cuck licenses and I wish that more people would start caring about the license they publish their code under, but the sad reality is that, especially in the rust community, the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses became the de facto standard, and that was without much pressure from the big corporations, though rust has its origins under the umbrella of Mozilla so it's not that surprising given this context.
I am aware that permissive licenses became the defacto form of licensing for new projects thanks to years of propaganda from big corps and especually Microsoft, who bought Github mainly for this. I never paid too much attention until I realized the potential for Rust projects to be widely adopted for replacing a big portion of copyleft libraries. This coreutils project was just an example to make the point, it seems very convenient and it is easy to dismiss the licencing choice as a coincidence. On the long term this might have huge implications a few generations ahead when big corps don't have to contribute nothing anymore to society. Look at what is happening with ~~Open~~CloseAI, open source models are lagging behind because there nothing equivalent to GNU/Copyleft in this field, thus we end up with a big corp mostly owned by Microsoft holding a life changing technology in its hands and hindering the progress of all society.