[Toaster-King]

The comments complaining about the choice of license reminded me that a FSF licensing intern did the same, and demanded it be changed due to some false claim about it being a derivative work[1]. Let me remind everyone that there was probably a good reason for using a permissive license, and no-one has the right to demand changes based on their definition of freedom - unless they stepped up and contributed.

If this truly injures you, you can either do your own rewrite or, like Muse Group, outright buy the rights to the software and relicense.

[1] https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/834

[marcan_42]

There's also this issue by FSF director Ian Kelling:

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/1781

Honestly, it sounds like they're deeply scared of long-standing FSF-backed software having to compete (or even be replaced) with alternatives that just happen not to be GPL (e.g. they have similar thoughts on LLVM/clang), to the point where they decide to troll the issue trackers. It feels really childish.

[josefx]

> with alternatives that just happen not to be GPL (e.g. they have similar thoughts on LLVM/clang)

LLVM/clang is worse than just GPL, as far as I understand the design of GCC is intentionally horribly bad to make it painful to integrate with a proprietary tool chain. Of course this means that things like refactoring support end up being basically impossible to build on GCC, so people move to clang out of necessity.

[josephcsible]

> Honestly, it sounds like they're deeply scared of long-standing FSF-backed software having to compete (or even be replaced) with alternatives that just happen not to be GPL

They are, for good reason. Big companies hate open source, despite their claims to the contrary. Look at Apple's proprietary forks of all the BSD stuff, and handset manufacturers' proprietary forks of Android. The FSF should absolutely be doing everything in their power to minimize how often this happens.