On Tue, Jul 14, 2026 at 12:06:57PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Let's say in 10 years that companies have sponsored BSD/Expat-rewrites (possibly LLM-assisted) of essentially all common GPL'd tools, and has showed multi-year sustained QA and release process of those projects. Compare OpenSSL, Clang or UUtils as inspirational projects.At the same time, development of GNU coreutils, sed, tar, gzip etc have slowed down and are in maintainance mode. It would then be easy to make the argument that those rewrites are "technically excellent".
Yes.
Do you think there could be some reason beyond "technical excellence" that would make us want to keep using the (strong) copyleft projects?
No.
What's left of the spirit of the DSG and DFSG if copyleft software is replaced?
I understand that "the spirit of something" is explicitly not codified anywhere so it's hard to discuss what shoiuld it imply, but I doubt that "strong copyleft" is included in it for most of the project.
-- WBR, wRAR
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