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They really want you to know that HashiCorp, an IBM Company is now owned by IBM. Looks like they have gone over that readme with sed.

Great, now people will read that as 'cold pizza is heathy'. If it makes any difference is will be marginal. Not eating pizza is still vastly more healthy overall. Eat pizza if you want, but don't be fooled to think cold pizza is good for you.

Upgrades is any security or big fix as well. Those tend to be quite safe in point release distros. Upgrading to a new point release version is has all the same problems the rolling release had over the same period all bundle in one messy upgrade (which makes them a huge pain to deal with as they often compound). But between those, the patch upgrades tend to be quite smooth.

I would say the over a longer time period rolling release break in bigger way less often. But they tend to have more but smaller breakages that are easy to trivial to fix.

Less chance of an update breaking things. Lots of small and frequent updates, instead of rare and large update packs/stacks.

I would say a rolling distro update has a higher chance of it breaking something. Each one might bring in a new major version of something that has breaking changes in it. But that breakage is typically easier to fix and less of a problem.

Point release distros tend to bundle up all their breakages between major versions so breaks loads of things at once. And that IMO can be more of a hassle then dealing with them one at a time as they come out.

I tended to find I needed to reinstall point release distros instead of upgrading them as it was less hassle. Which is still more disruptive then fixing small issues over time as the crop up.

It has an LTS kernel. Not a separate version. This does not make everything LTS. This is very different from LTS distros.

It is not just about your pc hardware. I much prefer running the latest software on it as I regularly use features from tools added in the last version of something. I would hate to have to wait 6 months to a year to be able to use new features that make my life easier. That might not be every bit of software I use but enough core things that I would notice.

Email support was the bain of my existence. I forgot how many misconfigured system I came across decades ago that would fill up their filesystem with logs from crons in the root mail dir. Such a stupid default setting. We have vastly better methods for monitoring systems these days then firing off an email when a cron runs.

You can also easily see when the job last ran, if it was successful and when it will next run. As well as just trigger the service if you want it to run now.

I was not trying to brush away the differences for GPL 2 vs 3. My point was just that I don't think a more permissive license on Coreutils would have caused every company to want to steal the code, get everyone using it and force out the GPLed version. But a more restrictive license (say one that infects other binaries on the system) would have meant fewer companies using it and thus fewer distros and everyone else using it.

But for other projects the balance is different and a more permissive license would cause issues. There are some projects that even the GPLv2 or even v3 is too permissive for.

sudo is not GPL3. It is not even GPL2. It is an old license that is just as permissive as the MIT license. It has never had any big problems with that being the case. I don't think that coreutils being GPL has really done anything to force companies to contribute back to it. It is mostly fixed in its function and does not really have much room for companies taking and modifying it to a point where others will favor the closed version over the open on. And what it provides is fairly trivial functions overall that if someone did want to take part of it then it is not terribly hard to rewrite it from scratch.

GNU Coreutils is not the only implementation of those POSIX features - just the most popular one. FreeBSD has its own, there is busybox, the rust ports and loads of other rewrites of the same functionality to various degrees. None of that really matters though as they dont really add much if any value to what coreutils provides as there is just not that much more value to add to these utilities now.

And it is not like the GPL license of coreutils affects other binaries on the system. So if you dont need to modify it and it does not infect other things there is little point in trying to take it over or use an alternative.

MacOS does not use a later version because they cannot. But also they don't care enough to even try to maintain their own.

GPL is important on other larger/more complex bits of software. But on coreutils/sudo IMO it does not matter nearly as much as people think it does.

Core Android and ChromOS don't need to be FOSS because they use the GPL. You can use the Linux kernel without having to make everything that runs on it GPL as well. Things that run on the kernel are not derivative works of the kernel. These projects are FOSS because google at the time thought it would give them an advantage to make the FOSS.

If you add too many restrictions to a license it does not force companies to give their stuff away for free, it just means they wont use your project which can drastically stunt the growth of your project. If Linux had a more restrictive license to start with all that would of happened is no one would have heard of it today as companies would have created something else that they can use.

There is no one size fits all safest option. Details matter and each project needs to read the licenses and decide on which suits their needs best.

MIT is probably the safest option for a company creating a library wrapping their service where there is no real value in others taking that code. Or for simpler libraries that are fairly easy to reproduce so the need to steal the code is low. Or you just don't care what others do with the code.

GPL is probably safest for some hobbies that does not care about companies and just wants everyone that is using their project to not bake it into a product they distribute. But also means companies likely wont want to use your project if it is a library.

LGPL might be a good option for library code if you want other companies to use and contribute back to some complex library you are using that is hard to reproduce in isolation.

Other licenses are needed if you want to prevent other hosted services from using your project without contributing back.

Different licenses exist for different reasons and it all depends on what you want for your project.