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The other would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-sad thing here is the idea that in 2021 the GNU Coreutils have the market leverage to convince consumers to choose free software over proprietary alternatives

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Hector Martin

@marcan42

Mar 30, 2021

Hey, want to take a guess what the @FSF's latest board member, Ian Kelling's, most recent contribution to Free Software is? That's right: harassing a project trying to rewrite common POSIX tools in Rust for being Anti-Freedom™. Because they chose the MIT license.

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Tony "Abolish ICE" Arcieri

@bascule

Mar 30, 2021

Replying to

@pcwalton

Just gonna leave this here github.com/uutils/coreuti

Tony "Abolish ICE" Arcieri

Replying to

and

Also this

Debian running on Rust coreutils

tldr: Rust/coreutils is good enough to boot a Debian with GNOME, install the top 1000 packages, build Firefox and the Linux Kernel.

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and

There's also landley.net/toybox/about.h as a permissive licensed BusyBox replacement (in C, not Rust). AOSP uses ToyBox as both the implementation of most *nix utilities in the OS and for building the OS. It's part of the AOSP toolchain used in the namespace-based build sandbox.

10:01 PM · Mar 30, 2021Twitter Web App

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and

Toybox's developer was previously the BusyBox maintainer. Conflict with GPLv3 proponents is why he ended up making it: landley.net/toybox/faq.htm Think he also got disillusioned as part of the GPL enforcement actions they started. Toybox makes GPL proponents particularly mad now.

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and

There's a whole drama over it: lwn.net/Articles/47830 GPL proponents see Toybox as essentially an anti-GPL-enforcement project. The Toybox maintainer is the person who *started* the BusyBox GPL enforcement actions and then grew disillusioned with it. I find it quite amusing.

lwn.net

A tempest in a toybox

The eLinux.org web site is currently promoting a project to write a replacement for Busybox under a permissive license. Normally, the writing of more free software is seen as a good thing, but, in...

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and

it does not aim to be fully compatible, so it would be horribly hard to use it as a replacement at the scale of a full distribution since you'd have to tweak scripts all over the place. with the Rust coreutils you can aim for very minimal changes, if any