Post #1554903

2026-04-22 23:46 UTC

mit lets companies take them without contributing back critical stuff like security fixes. their money and resources is very important to keep foss alive and it relies a lot on the gpl because it just means they are forced to take responsibility for the projects they use to make their billions.

Replies (2)

@arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone 2026-04-23 04:11

That’s great, except they could already just use a permissively licensed implementation. This is in fact what a lot of companies already do. For instance, Android uses Toybox, macOS uses utilities originally ripped from NetBSD (mostly), etc. Generally, a lot of companies also don’t contribute back fixes upstream. They’ll often just dump the code in some hidden away corner of their site as a giant source blob. For something like coreutils, where a significant change is sort of unlikely in the first place, thinking the GPL makes a difference is bizarre to me.

Open ##1554902
@MangoCats@feddit.it 2026-04-23 19:15

critical stuff like security fixes. Yeah, that’s straight outta Canonical’s “pay us for extended support” playbook. Which is why I shifted to Debian a couple of years back. Canonical used to add positive value to Ubuntu, now they’ve shifted into the negative from my perspective.

Open ##1591758