In Case Rust Censors It (Rust Has Long Been All About Censorship), Here's a Critical Look at Rust's Goals
Censorship is a core part of Rust; we've covered examples for as long as half a decade. Rust even censors Microsoft critics.
This was posted 9 hours ago about the "memory safety" red herring:
I’m shocked the Rust community is pushing an MIT licensed Rust rewrite of GNU coreutils
I just stumbled upon a very interesting Rust project and community called uutils, which is rewriting GNU coreutils (and others) in Rust. Great idea, I thought, and it has recently emerged as a "real" thing, promising replacement tools soon.
But I looked more closely and was shocked by what I found. They have replaced the GPL with MIT license. Here is the reasoning, from the FAQ of their blogpost:
Why the MIT License?
For consistency purposes. We're not interested in a license debate and will continue to use the MIT license, as we did with Coreutils.What a glaring non-answer. And there is no link to any reasoning.
A poster on Reddit called this "GNU plus Linux minus GNU" in a way mocking Richard Stallman's call to recognize GNU's contribution to Linux. Another said:
A small win for cooperation, but a massive loss for user rights.
Someone asked:
Did the project publicly post a rationale somewhere for why they didn't go with GNU License?
And received this reply:
Yeah, author doesn't have a huge preference. If contributors want to switch, he's fine with that.
And yet, apparently there will be no further debate about the license.
Uutils was also supported by Google Summer of Code. Coincidence?
It's beginning to look like Uutils is a Trojan horse in the Linux community, meant to replace core utilities (literally coreutils!) with a non-GNU version, promising memory safety but stealing user freedom.
Honestly I'm shocked things could have gotten this far. The project is coming to fruition as we speak.
Open question for the Rust community: is this the kind of license politics you are going to bring to the Linux Kernel? Is refurbishing Linux with an MIT license somewhere down the line, care of Google money?
Just for the record, no amount of memory safety will ever convince me to use MIT coreutils. Software freedom is more important than memory safety.
I'm shocked that 530+ Rust developers (says the Uutils blog) have signed up for this dangerous move without a rationale and without any debate. How dare they?
If these tools make their way into Linux distributions, as seems to be the goal, it's going to be war. We're not going to allow technofascists to steal Linux away from us, one Rust rewrite at a time. The whole Rust-in-the-Linux-kernel debate just got serious. We need to move against this development forcefully and decisively so that Rust development in Linux can move forward with confidence.
The first step is to demand the uutils leaders to provide their justification for the MIT license and provide a roadmap for releasing under the GPL. Play time is over.
We've said things to that effect for many years. Rust has this mentality of replacing everything, even when there's no good reason to (think systemd). The people who do this love censorship, they almost always embrace proprietary tools (such as Microsoft GitHub), and they throw tantrums at people who do not agree.
Speaking of GNU, RMS gives a public talk later today. Yesterday pages in Italian and German were published about it:
The above says: "There are many threats to digital freedom as nonfree software, massive surveillance, and censorship. Nonfree programs are often designed to restrict, control or manipulate users. Free software is the first battle in the liberation of the digital society."
In the case of Rust, instead of "the liberation of the digital society" we have empowerment of Microsoft GitHub and of GAFAM in general. Guess who funds this...
RMS criticises Rust usually because of the trademarks. █