Daniel Quinn

Really? All I’ve seen is a Flatpak that’s really just a wrapped web view. Is there now a native version of Teams for Linux?

This is what I get for posting at 1am. Thanks for the clarification. Yeah I just assumed it was the same situation as coreutils.

Granted, sudo isn’t in coreutils, but it’s sufficiently standard that I’d argue that the licence is very relevant to the wider Linux community.

Anyway, I answered this at length the last time this subject came up here, but the TL;DR is that private companies (like Canonical, who owns Ubuntu) love the MIT license because it allows them to take the code and make proprietary versions of it without having to release the source code. Consider the implications of a sudo binary that’s Built For Ubuntu™ with closed-source proprietary hooks into Canonical’s cloud auth provider. It’s death by a thousand MIT-licensed cuts to our once Free operating system.

Is it GPL though? If this is a case of MIT-licensed stuff weaseling its way into Linux core utils, I’m not interested.

Before wading into the Wine waters, you might want to have a look at the Free and excellent Kdenlive. I’ve no experience with Filmora, but Kdenlive is surprisingly powerful.

The best example I could point to would be BSD. Unlike Linux, the BSD kernel was BSD (essentially MIT) -licensed. This allowed Apple to take their code and build OSX and a multi-billion dollar company on top of it, giving sweet fuck all back the community they stole from.

That’s the moral argument: it enables thievery.

The technical argument is one of practicality. MIT-licensed projects often lead to proprietary projects (see: Apple, Android, Chrome, etc) that use up all the oxygen in an ecosystem and allow one company to dominate where once we had the latitude to use better alternatives.

• Step 1 is replacing coreutils with uutils.
• Step 2 is Canonical, Google, or someone else stealing uutils to build a proprietary “fuutils” that boasts better speeds, features, or interoperation with $PROPRIETARY_PRODUCT, or maybe even a new proprietary kernel.
• Step 3 is where inevitably uutils is abandoned and coreutils hasn’t been updated in 10 years. Welcome to 1978, we’re back to using UNIX.

The GPL is the tool that got us here, and it makes these exploitative techbros furious that they can’t just steal our shit for their personal profit. We gain nothing by helping them, but stand to lose a great deal.

Ubuntu. They’ve managed the worst of both worlds: like Debian, everything is old (though admittedly not as old), but unlike Debian, everything is broken/buggy/flakey. It’s the old-and-busted distro that I’m routinely told is “the only Linux we support”.