Nothing about this suggests they will put “subscription barriers” on anything.
Stop scaremongering
There’s lots of good reasons to use rust over C.
Even if it was GPL, since they developed the tools, they can still dual licence. It just means any third party contributions added to the GPL code couldn’t be added back into the proprietary one. That’s what GPL helps protect against… It doesn’t stop the original developers releasing a commercial version at all.
Not that there is any evidence they would… If they were trying to achieve that, you wouldn’t target coreutils (you’d target more profitable things, like a desktop environment, or drivers)
Technically, it doesn’t even stop them adding contributor code to a proprietary implementation if that WAS the case (which it clearly isn’t). They’d just need need the contributor agreement to pass ownership of any contributions to Canonical (which is generally in a lot of the agreements anyway, to protect against developers trying to sue later).
That has to be the absolute dumbest take ever.
Nothing about this suggests they will put “subscription barriers” on anything.
Stop scaremongering
There’s lots of good reasons to use rust over C.
Even if it was GPL, since they developed the tools, they can still dual licence. It just means any third party contributions added to the GPL code couldn’t be added back into the proprietary one. That’s what GPL helps protect against… It doesn’t stop the original developers releasing a commercial version at all.
Not that there is any evidence they would… If they were trying to achieve that, you wouldn’t target coreutils (you’d target more profitable things, like a desktop environment, or drivers)
Actually, just to add to this…
Technically, it doesn’t even stop them adding contributor code to a proprietary implementation if that WAS the case (which it clearly isn’t). They’d just need need the contributor agreement to pass ownership of any contributions to Canonical (which is generally in a lot of the agreements anyway, to protect against developers trying to sue later).