On Mon, Jul 13, 2026 at 10:30:44PM -0500, Simon Josefsson wrote: > My point earlier in the thread was that by replacing (strongly) copyleft > software by non-copyleft software (and I include weak-copyleft in the > non-copyleft category) in Debian there is a risk the technical > excellence of Debian will be used to subjugate users, and that > eventually this could erode the foundation for why Debian is technically > excellent in the first place.
The way to keep Debian "technically excellent" is use technically excellent components, regardless of whether they are licensed using a strong-copyleft, weak-copyleft, or a permissive license. I believe that choosing technically inferior software because it has a license that we might find preferable is ultimately self-defeating. > Maybe it will take 20 years rather than 10, but I feel this is > inevitable. I don't see it as evil but merely a logical progression. I > mostly enjoy this too: older Debian contained a lot of unsustainable > things. bash and gawk are slow or complex compared to dash and mawk. I disagree with your premise that it is an inevitable trend. For many use cases, bash and gawk has features that make them more convenient than dash and mawk. In fact, I tend to prefer them to less functional alternatives for certain scripting use cases. If I want speed, I wouldn't be using a scripting tool at all --- I'd use something like golang instead. We could talk about some of your other comparisons: Seqoia vs GnuPG, Clang vs GCC, but I note that you omitted one of the major counter examples to your thesis --- namely, the Linux Kernel vs FreeBSD. That's an example where the strong copyright licensed component has been more popular, and more features, than the permissive-licensed kernel. So I don't think the death of strong copyright is inevitable. > That's the same arguments we use to convince people to use Debian > instead of Windows or macOS, isn't it? I don't, anyway. I try to convince people to use Debian where it make sense for their use case. For that matter, although my laptop runs MacOS, I'm doing development using a Debian environment, using Apple's Container CLI manager[1] [1] https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/container-machine.md I used to use the proprietary software Parallels to run Debian on MacOS, but I'm now using the Apache licensed Container CLI. This may not be your preferred strong copyright license, but it's an example of moving from Proprietary -> FOSS, which hopefully you'll agree is preferable. And when when it comes to testing Linux kernels on my Macbook, I use the GPLv2-licensed qemu to run my xfstests test appliance[2]. (Which uses bash, not dash for its shell scripting. :-P) [2] https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld/blob/master/Documentation/kvm-xfstests.md It's not a matter of popularity, but using the best possible tool for the job. And if you want to see copyleft software succeed, the best way to do that is contribute to make it better. Not to try to force or gatekeep users to using softare that isn't best suited for them just because of the license --- that way only lies the death of our credibility. Cheers, - Ted
