That’s when it starts. It’s timed around contract cycles for several major employers. Unions have been working to line this up so a fuck load of people can legally strike. It goes until demands are met.

May Day 2026. Anyone involved in any actual Union or labor activity in America has know this was gonna be the date for a like a year now so everyone has time to prepare

This is exactly how I feel. I’m not even opposed to automation of these tasks on a fundamental level like some people might be. I just fear the transition won’t be thought out at all and will be devastating for the working class. The last time we had sudden automation of this scale was the Industrial Revolution which completely reshaped western society and was very bad for those who lived through it despite the eventual high modern standard of living it produced. I think this may end up going similarly.

Keep it GPL is just keep it free as all it does is maintain further downstream projects also stay free.

Now I guess your comment about enforcement is true that the original licenser has the power to enforce their license. I guess that will make the coming decades interesting as the original licensers of these projects die. Surely when Linux finally kicks the bucket people don’t immediately get free rein to violate Linux’s GPL? Regardless I still don’t see how that gives the owner any power over you besides enforcing you keep it free. You can still do whatever you want with the code.

Fair enough that’s an argument I hadn’t heard. I must admit “Free but you must keep it free” not being free enough for you strikes me as such a dumb argument I can’t fathom it being made in good faith but fair enough I guess.

Now I will say your comment about durable intellectual property ownership is interesting philosophically but I also don’t agree. No one “owns” GPL code. It’s public for everyone and anyone can fork it or whatever. GPL doesn’t give the original owner any power over others it just requires the code which was born free to stay free.

Corporations are by their nature entities with priorities that are not aligned to the good of society. It is natural and obvious that we do everything in our power to compel them to do the best thing for society rather than the best thing for them.

Also while valve tends to be a pretty fair company they don’t need to be proprietary. Their product is selling game licenses and server space for cloud sync, none of that requires a closed source client. So while valve may be my favorite corpo they don’t get a pass from my previous statement about not being sympathetic to wanting to profit of community projects without giving back.

The exact problem you point out is in my view a feature not a bug because it means there is an economic advantage to someone doing what steam does but open source. Which is exactly the sort of incentive that helps capitalism help people.

Hmm you could very well be right. I guess I’m being to reasonable by knowing new rust code is not automatically (and not usually) more secure then old c battle tested c code. Shareholders and CEOs don’t understand that, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s been convinced rust is axiomatically more secure and bankrolling the migration over it

Yea know that is a fair point. I guess I struggle to see any other reason to support this? Even though I believe rust is nominally more secure it’ll be a decade before any core utils clone will be as hardened as the original just by virtue of the original having decades of bug finding and fixes done already.

I don’t think canonical would go through the effort under normal circumstances but I think they’re just taking the opportunity in front of them to ride the rust hype into a less copyleft ecosystem.

This actually ties into a broader complaint I have that the rust ecosystem is built around MIT due to influence of the corporate backers of the rust foundation. Which is unfortunate because I actually really love rust as a language.

I actually an agree an independent rust project would be really cool. If it was also GPL. I have yet to encounter any argument against GPL that doesn’t boil down to corpo boot licking.

You say “Even if it ends up being in a proprietary program, it’s better than not being able to use the code”. This is a bad faith argument. Everyone can use GPL code freely, the restriction is only that you must also publish under GPL if you publish. I’m sorry your favorite corporation can’t profit off community projects without giving back to that community… not. If GPL was a real problem BSD would have overtaken Linux ages ago. But it didn’t because GPL is good not just for the community but for the project. The only people that don’t stand to gain from GPL are corporations that want to monopolize the technology.

Uh call it whatever you want but canonical pouring money and resources into development of corporate friendly licensed clones to existing tools so they can avoid copyleft restrictions in the future is not good. I never understand when people feel the need to defend corporations obviously harmful behavior.

Because Canonicals real goal is to move Ubuntu entirely to corporate friendly licensing under the pretense of migrating to rust. Obviously they leave the original untouched, it’s a matter of adoption. Without the oxidization argument nobody would have gone along with Ubuntu just deciding to do a clean room implementation of gnu tools in corporate friendly licensing, by making it about oxidation they are able to manipulate a large portion of the rust community into contributing/supporting their license laundering.

As a developer I love rust but canonical can fuck all the way off with this shameless license laundering.