The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the “experimental” tag will be coming off. Congratulations are in order for all of the Rust for Linux team.
No. The Rust code in the kernel is GPLv2 just like the rest of the kernel. The licence of the compiler has nothing to do with that, that’s nonsense Rust haters make up.
You can argue against independent projects like the Rust coreutils not using a copyleft license, but that has nothing to do with Rust or the kernel. There are independent C projects without non-copyleft licenses too.
Ah thank you. You likely guessed the reason for the question.
Many popular projects written in Rust, including the UUtils core utils rewrite, are MIT licensed as Rust is. There have been people that purposely confuse things by saying that “the Rust community” is undermining the GPL. I can see how that may lead somebody to believe that there is some kind of inherent licence problem with code written in Rust.
Code written in Rust can of course be licensed however you want from AGPL to fully proprietary.
I personally perceive a shift in license popularity towards more permissive licenses at least with the “younger generation”. The fact that so many Rust projects are permissively licensed is just a consequence of those kinds of licenses being more popular with the kinds of “modern” programmers that would choose Rust as a language to begin with. Those programmers would choose the same licenses even they used the GCC toolchain. But the “modern” languages they have to choose from are things like Rust, Swift, Zig, Go, or Gleam (all permissively licensed ). Python and TypeScript are also still trendy (also permissively licensed).
Looking at that list, it is pretty silly to focus on Rust’s license. Most of the popular programming languages released over the past 20 years are permissively licensed.
How would that ever be a problem in any case? I mean I’m not that versed in licensing stuff, but MIT explicitly allows sublicensing, so if in doubt just slap a GPL-sticker on the MIT code and you are good, no?