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 coreutils are particularly a choke-point for corporations. They can and do freely use them in their infra like everyone else. For your fears to hold any water you would have to find examples of popular libraries getting drop-in rewrites (but keep in mind that such rewrites are much more complicated due to having to provide a C or C++ interface to make it an actual replacement). Personally, I think the rewrites can be interesting not because they are rewritten in Rust particularly, but because decades-old code contains assumptions and maintains compatibility that might not be relevant today. So a rewritten program can be cleaner and even faster. Same deal with neovim (partially; but it also pushed vim proper to finally implement async plugins which they heavily pushed back against)