New Debian/Hurd follows closely behind new Debian Linux
www.theregister.com
: The official GNU microkernel is still breathing – and now it's 64-bit

The GNU project was started in 1983 and in 2025 you can finally use a pure GNU operating system. Not that you’d want to but that is some serious perseverance.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      5·
      2 hours ago

      First, there has been massive amounts of MIT code in important parts of the Linux ecosystem for decades. Xorg, Wayland, and Mesa for starters. The sky has not fallen. I am not exactly panicking.

      But let’s address your specific example.

      Let start by pointing out that Redis was BSD, not MIT. But let’s assume your cautionary tale applies.

      A truly gigantic corporation, Amazon, was making all the money off Redis without giving anything back to the company that actually wrote the code (Redis). So, Redis tried to change the license to make that more difficult. The license they chose is the strictest free software license the FSF offers—the AGPL.

      Pop quiz: what part of the above are we “the community” outraged about? The clearly predatory Amazon stuff? Or the defensive action by the company writing all the code? That’s right, we are mad at the company that gave us all the code for free and that still licenses it AGPL.

      But even beyond that, what was lost again? Because the implication is that BSD (or MIT) somehow allows companies to “take” free software from us. This is false.

      What happened with Redis is that the original code remained 100% available. And it remained part of a 100% free software project. It remains 100% BSD licensed to this day. You can use it, you can study it, you can improve it, you can share it, and you can even sell it commercially! It offers you at least FIVE freedoms.

      https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey

      Not a single line of code was lost from the project. Yes, the project had to change its name (Redis owns the name Redis). Yes, Redis stopped contributing to the project. Is that not their right?

      It is that last bit that seems to drive us mad. We yell about corporations taking our code. But all the examples of bad behaviour we give boil down to them choosing to give us less of theirs.

      If “the community” is the one writing the code, nobody can take it from us. And even if big evil companies are writing the code, the only code that they can deny us is code they write in the future.

      I find it hard to be either outraged or even particularly afraid of that.

      Anyway, I do not want to talk you out of your license preferences. I have no beef with that. But I do wish there was less FUD slinging at projects that choose to license their hard work as MIT.