Hello, On Thu, 9 Jul 2026, at 17:43, Hakan Bayındır wrote: > Let me put another forward-looking statement: Big Linux vendors might > stop sharing source packages for their versions of uutils, and may even > bake in DRM and/or “user-watching analytics” features into them to > TiVoize their distributions, effectively making them non-free. This > possibility bothers me. While I have nothing about the author(s) of > uutils (I don’t know them to begin with), the possibility of this > bothers me a lot. Do we want Debian to be one of these vendors, > enabling this possibility? Where does it place Debian in relation to > its motto, “The Universal Operating System”? > > Am I (or others putting this possibility forward) blowing this out of > proportion, too?
I think so. Vendors who wanted to ship non-GPL or not completely free userland already do so (see toybox, old GPL-2 coreutils, custom userland tools etc.) These days it’s not coreutils that matter, but what’s on top of them. And there, unfortunately, Android and the likes have won, with ecosystem nothing like Linux distributions we know and use. -- Cheers, Andrej
