On 7/5/26 9:08 PM, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
This site is not a Debian resource. Discussing it on debian-devel seems
moot.
As long as there is nothing actually happening in Debian, lets please
just close this discussion, without further moving goalposts and
accusing people.
I disagree for several reasons:
1. this (incorrect?) statement was issued by official member of Debian
project [1] so we simply can't say that there is no impact (or relation)
to Debian project.
2. many Linux news sites will happily take such statements as facts and
spread them around Internet as already made decisions
3. switching essential part of system from GNU GPL to MIT license may
have devastating consequences on Linux ecosystem - it will allow
companies to make truly proprietary Linux distributions (MIT does not
force them to release source code) and kill their clones (Ubuntu clones,
or in case of RedHat: Alma, Rocky) once and forever (!)
4. making base system to depend on Rust allows few subjects to control
what hardware will (or not) run Linux. It is already endangering
several Debian ports (forcing Rust dependency in APT that has no
technical reasoning). Due Rust compiler/build complexity it is very
unlikely that many less popular platforms will ever gain usable Rust
support...
5. Additionally Apache/MIT licensing of Rust allows selling dedicated
Rust compiler for proprietary hardware - effectively locking it from
Open Source community access. GPLed GCC ensures that once someone is
providing GCC binaries for proprietary platform it must provide also
source code so community is able to fully access use and customize it.
So there is huge impact of switching to Rust coreutils in Debian - not
just technical but also due license change. These things should be
seriously considered before it is too late as it happened with switch to
systemd - anybody remember that? - there was consensus that Debian
should switch to systemd but also provide alternative init system - but
later it was simply said it was too late to offer alternative - so now
we have systemd only although it was not original intention. We should
learn from that and avoid same fate when rushing to switch coreutils.
Best regards
--Henryk Paluch
[1] https://nm.debian.org/person/sylvestre/
