cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35495679
Earlier post version: image/text.
From another article referenced there:
The maintainers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution are now rewriting GNU Coreutils in Rust. Instead of using the GPLv3 license, which is designed to make sure that the freedoms and rights of the user of the program are preserved and always respected over everything else, the new version is going to be released using the very permissible or “permissive” (non-reciprocal) MIT license, which allows creating proprietary closed-source forks of the program.
There will surely be small incompatibilities - either intentional or accidental - between the Rust rewrite of coreutils and the GNU/C version. If the Rust version becomes popular - and it probably will, if Ubuntu starts using it - the Rust people will start pushing their own versions of higher level programs that are only compatible with the Rust version of coreutils. They will most probably also spam commits to already existing programs making them incompatible with the GNU/C version of coreutils. That way either everyone will be forced into using the MIT-licensed Rust version of coreutils, or the Linux userland becomes even more broken than it already is because now we have again two incompatible sets of runtime functions that conflict with one another. Either way, both outcomes benefit the corporations that produce proprietary software.
(Source – which does contain some more-than-problematic language outside of these passages, compare the valid objections raised by others here and in the cross-posts.)
Compare also how leaders of Canonical/Ubuntu have ties to Microsoft, and how the Canonical employee who leads the push to rewrite coreutils as non-GPL-licensed Rust software has spent years working for the British Army, where he “Architected and built multiple high-end bespoke Electronic Surveillance capabilities”, by his own proud admission.
Fuck, I’m so tired of canonical’s bullshit.
They used to be a boon for the free software ecosystem, now they’re a detriment whenever it’s convenient.
There are some scumbags in that company eager to profit off of lowering people’s standards wherever possible.
Do not let them. They don’t need a nicer campus.
Rust people seem to be focused mostly on identity politics and dividing people into groups that are then supposed to fight each other.
Yeah, this guy can eat my entire ass. This is the same language that fascists use to delegitimize anyone who isn’t straight and white.
at first, i lol’ed at the c/rust divide because i thought it was another silly holy war like emacs/vi but it’s taken on a MUCH bigger and troubling role
The problem is there are tons of c developers who are old and don’t want anything new. But C is unsafe and don’t come back with a skills issue we have tons of examples of C being unsafe and in big projects it is hard to see every mistake. And I’m not saying rust is the answer but to eliminate 90% of most bugs a memory safe language should be used.
the licensing seems to be the issue here instead of the possible exploits.
I’d say a bigger issue is the adoption of non-free software.
It doesn’t matter what language you choose; if you pick a non-free license then you are part of the problem.
He’s not wrong, though.
There is way more social activism among Rust developers than other languages.
If you read the Rust manual, it even says at the very beginning that the entire purpose behind Rust is empowerment.
Just because people say things you don’t like doesn’t mean they’re not true.
Absolute trash article.
The first thing that I noticed back then
When is ‘then’? Because that affects the meaning of the rest of the paragraph. Prior to Rust 1.0 a lot of things changed in backwards-incompatible way. Currently, if you learn something, you can continue applying that knowledge.
I don’t want to learn something that does not last - that feels like a wasted time when I could also learn skills that remain usable to the far future.
Then software engineering is not a career for you. Maybe you could become a bricklayer because pretty much everywhere technologies changes and if you want to be at the top of the game you need to learn new skills.
That was long before I even noticed how disgusting people many Rust programmers are.
So are many C programmers. Or Python programmers. Or Heskell programmers.
If you go to the website of the Rust programming language nowadays, one of the first things you’ll notice is that their primary communication platform is Discord.
This is blatant lie. The first thing I see when I go to the website is that Rust has official Mastodon, Blueksy and YouTube channels. And if you go to Community page you’ll see the main communication channels are self-hosted forum, and Zulip.
Another thing that you notice immediately if you use an independent web browser is that their developer forum does not work. If you use a “non-supported” browser, or have JavaScript disabled, the webpage body has a CSS property “overflow-y: hidden !important;” which prevents the user from scrolling the page. On top of the page there is a banner that tells you to download one of the “supported browsers”, which are Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
What is the issue exactly?
Which leads me to the next point. Rust people are clearly hostile towards or generally against free software.
So let me get this straight, you’ve poisoned the well with lies and irrelevant information to prime readers to hate Rust and accept your point. Got it.
There will surely be small incompatibilities - either intentional or accidental - between the Rust rewrite of coreutils and the GNU/C version.
Why are you so sure that there will be incompatibilities? The stated goal of the project uutils is ‘to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils’ and ‘differences with GNU are treated as bugs’.
If the Rust version becomes popular […] the Rust people will start pushing their own versions of higher level programs that are only compatible with the Rust version of coreutils. They will most probably also spam commits to already existing programs making them incompatible with the GNU/C version of coreutils. […]
This is pure speculation aimed to support a conclusion that the author has. uutils aims to be fully compatible and there are no indications that this goal isn’t sincere.
Rust’s licensing is also problematic. The license has been worded in such a vague way that it may or may not allow forking or re-implementation. It may or may not require deleting all references to the word “rust” from a fork or re-implementation.
All of that is fully compatible with FSF and OSI definitions. There is nothing new in requirement that forks use a different name.
The rest seems to be just ‘Rust people’ generalisations and lies.
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Your criticism omits the passages about usage of the MIT license over the GPL (the ones I quoted in the post). I haven’t quoted the other parts of the article because they are not as substantial, but their being opinionated and questionable in what they say about ‘Rust people’ does not mitigate the recklessness of those who strive to create MIT-licensed replacements for GNU coreutils.
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Discord on the website of the Rust project: That’s not a lie at all: it was the truth at the time of publication on March 19, and even as late as May (having been there for at least four years). So it appears that the Rust project has decided to drop Discord as an officially advertised channel. Good move. I would think that vocal criticism like the author’s played a role in this.
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Rust forum telling users to use Firefox, Chrome or Safari, and refusing to be accessible by other browsers (however circumventible this may have been): How was this not a sign of flagrant disregard for free software and for people’s right to use the web however the fuck they want to use it - or how they need to use it, in case of disabilities? (This antifeature doesn’t seem to be in place anymore, but compare point 2.)
Your criticism omits the passages about usage of the MIT license over the GPL (the ones I quoted in the post).
I’ve addressed it:
Why are you so sure that there will be incompatibilities? The stated goal of the project uutils is ‘to be a drop-in replacement for the GNU utils’ and ‘differences with GNU are treated as bugs’.
[…]
This is pure speculation aimed to support a conclusion that the author has. uutils aims to be fully compatible and there are no indications that this goal isn’t sincere.
Discord on the website of the Rust project: That’s not a lie at all: it was the truth at the time of publication on March 19
I stand corrected regarding it being a blatant lie. However, the paragraph is still at least manipulative since nothing indicated that it was the primary communication platform. The forums were listed before it. At most you could argue Discord was primary chat platform, but even that is irrelevant considering that anyone who didn’t like Discord had an alternatives.
Sounds like the author is authoritarian and wants to dictate what people can and cannot use on the Internet.
How was this not a sign of flagrant disregard for free software and for people’s right to use the web however the fuck they want to use it
Last I checked Firefox and Chromium were free software and the forums work in both. Furthermore, if anything you should have issue with Discourse rather than Rust since that’s the software running the forums. Or better still, submit patches to fix compatibility issues.
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Finally, some legitimate critique of Rust, that does not revolve around “DEI bad” or “memory safety bad”!
Both can be criticized within reason. Yes, there’s that infamous Rust dev, who likes to sabotage projects she’s involved with the moment things don’t go the way she wants it, thinks the word “cancer” is somehow a slur, and of course loves to send her followers after people for various reasons, often while purposefully misinterpreting people’s words. All while spreading either the evopsych “extreme female brain theory of borderline personality disorder” nonsense, or the “cluster B abuse” nonsense made up by far-right theologists masquerading as psychologists to explain trans people on the terms of christian fundamentalism and without allowing them to live life as they want. This (nor other similarly bad Rust devs, nor callout culture in general, nor other things like the whole “master” branch fiasco with Github) does not mean we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, like Brian Lunduke and other far-right adjacent people want us to do, all while pretending their position is the “centist” one, because “real fascists did those things for the sake of pure evil, but we have good reasons to do those very same things, like crime statistics and IQ tests”.
Same with memory safety. We usually get the “skill issue” type of critique, meaning “just write better code”. I personally prefer D’s approach to memory safety with its multi-level solution alongside with the much nicer code for the unsafe stuff. And I guess Rust also have something similar to D’s
--noboundscheckcompiler flag as a way to disable boundschecks in times it’s needed.This all creates a situation I’ve first seen unfolding during the whole gamergate culture war fiasco. Thanks to burnt out atheist YouTubers making bad faith critique of Anita Sarkeesian’s videos lead to the rebrand of Morality in Media to NCOSE and the formation of Collective Shout, which ultimately lead to the whole payment processor censorship issue. Thanks to alt-right chuds constantly misgendering and sending death threats to Brianna Wu enabled a racist abuser to hide within our circles. And thanks to chud developers wanting to “give real treatment to gender confused people” and wanting to “gatekeep” software development from newbies, actual critiques of the Rust language, such as a heavily OCaml-influenced language being sold as a C replacement (if not a C++ replacement - all without true built-in OOP support), or the fact a functional programming language is being sold as a general purpose language, all because “you can opt out” (Java also technically allows you to opt-out from most OOP features).
I posted 2 years ago about the same concerns on /r/StallmanWasRight and the lemmy rust community. Many dismissed it as a conspiracy theory … Not that I agree with the form and language used in this article but ditching GPL coreutils from prominent distros is a turning point and slippery slope for Free Software and Linux.
Ubuntu Pro intensifies with the full support of the tools under a custom license.
Glad I switched to Debian a few years ago.
Got tired of seeing that advertisement every time I logged in.
Fuck Canonical and whatever scumstains keep trying to profit off of people’s low standards.
Fuck that entirely
The title is bs. There is no “push by Canonical”. A random person on the internet wrote Uutils in Rust because it’s easy to write fast code in it. Then Canonical wants to package the software but they aren’t “pushing”, they are just packaging software someone else wrote. Canonical’s goal is memory safety but that’s not the author’s goal because Coreutils haven’t got many vulnerabilities anyways.
The licensing part is sort of sad. The author picked MIT, because he does not care. He also said that he does not want drama. Well he did get the drama. The sad part is that I think that he would be willing to change the license to GPL, had it not been for all the childish drama and “hate”. Communication is difficult for people online, unfortunately.
It’s not really childish if you understand the implications of choosing a license.
I’m tired of mornic losers being afraid to fight for what they believe in because it might make them look bad in front of their peers.
If you care about the subject, then you shouldn’t let the opinions of idiots dictate your actions.
Well, on þe one hand, BSD, which already has overlap wiþ GNU core but under þe BSD license. Þere’s even already a Linux distro built around þe BSD core - it’s a distribution Stallman can’t insist is GNU/Linux.
OTOH, Ubuntu is one of þe big, influential distributions.
OTOOH, Ubuntu failed to make everyone use Upstart, and has failed to make everyone use Snap… þe former is dead, and þe latter is almost exclusively used by Ubuntu. Even Ubuntu forks don’t consistently base þeir software distribution on it.
OTO**O_O_**H, þe Rust fad is at its peak, so þey’ll undoubtedly sucker a lot of OSS developers into contributing free labor building tools, which þey can - wiþout FOSS licensing defense - co-opt and commercialize.
I’m not really worried about þis, but I wasn’t really worried about Trump, and yet he just kicked off his coup, so I’m clearly not a good judge of bellwethers.
I’m really not a fan of this whole rust movement. Statically linked binary, no ta.
I’ve started looking for another c/c++ based shell to go back to, now that fish has moved to rust (ideally ones that follow xdg config specs etc). Ysh (oils) is current choice.
Rust isn’t the problem.
It’s the licensing.
That was long before I even noticed how disgusting people many Rust programmers are.
His entire argument is rather undercut by his grandpa-level ranting about “discord” and the use of JavaScript on rust forums.
Those are all legitimate concerns that useful idiots have been conditioned to ignore.
Man, I miss when only half the first world was on the Internet.
We need barriers of entry to keep morons and their asinine rhetoric out.
As the saying goes, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think @floofloof@lemmy.ca summed things up pretty well here.
Also, from my reply to that comment:
As for the off-putting statements about ‘Rust people’: Since the article was published on March 19, I wonder if much of it, revolving around what the author saw as indications of authoritarianism, came from heavy disquiet in the face of authoritarianism’s recent gaining hold of the White house. I’d even consider it likely that people who post on Techrights have an above-average sensitivity for this kind of thing. It could be that the author has since arrived at a more differentiated and just view. Of note, since the time of his writing, the Rust project did remedy things that he criticized about their website.
I’m struggling to connect the dots between “X person used to work in electronic surveillance” and an immediate risk to the open source software being developed by a different employer. Is there some reason to think this person is still working for their old employer? Or is the speculation that they are a idologue out to destroy Linux from the inside?
If there’s something unsafe in the code, especially a rust rewrite of the coreutils I’d expect it’s going to be found immediately. People are going to go over that code with a fine toothed comb.
If the central idea of the article is “I don’t think there’s a place in the FOSS community for people with different ideas/beliefs/history than me” then the author should come out and say that (many have in the past). Claiming we’re at risk because of some wild speculation about a nefarious plot between the military and Microsoft to attack Linux and privacy… it really does require something more firm than this.
I think what they’re trying to imply is that Canonical is setting this all up so they can create a (possibly paid) fork of coreutils that spys on its users.
