Rust Programming

One thing I can imagine is even something like unconscious “self censorship”, choosing more permissive license to attract more people and even corporations which will hire developers…

This is the result of years of anti-copyleft propaganda which started to pay off. Now, all that corps need to do is wait for new projects and libraries to pop up and subtly (more than often openly) allocate resources to whichever project they need, or simply EEE. A much easier exercise than it was during the early years of copyleft where we could literally have a free alternate operating system to Microsoft, Apple and IBM while they were openly fighting it. Read on the Education and Government Incentives program for a reminder of what corporations are capable of.

I highly doubt these are sponsored by any big corp, just hobbyists/students that think it is interesting project to undertake that don’t care as much about the GPL as much as they care about doing something interesting to them.

I wanted to test this theory, quickly looking at the commit history you can see that although the project might have started as a hobby/student weekend project, it is currently maintained by someone with an official affiliation of director at Mozilla corp.

PS: I am not pointing the finger to any entity here, I picked this project as an example to have a discussion on this topic.

That is because GPL libraries are a pain for corporations. And popular languages like rust are built by corporations and a lot of the libraries for them are built by corporations. Rust would not be the same language as it is today without their contributions. If it were all GPL far few companies would want to use it so far fewer developers would be able to use it which would stunt its popularity. This is also true of python libraries and npm libraries which are mostly under permissive licences.

I do wonder how it would hold up on court to basically clone something by rewriting it in a different programming language and then relicense it.

I believe that the US court has already rules that programming APIs are not copyrightable - only the implementation is. So a rewrite of something does not infringe on the original. Though proving you have not copied source from the original is harder - a clean room rewrite is generally preferred for such things (where the authors have not seen the original implementation ever before). I believe the google vs oracle lawsuits over java/openjdk was where the precedence was set. Though I am not a lawyer and could have gotten this wrong.

If cloning something by rewriting it would be an issue the GNU utils would have the same problem since they're also just clones of proprietary Unix commands that the GNU project doesn't own

I am aware that permissive licenses became the defacto form of licensing for new projects thanks to years of propaganda from big corps and especually Microsoft, who bought Github mainly for this. I never paid too much attention until I realized the potential for Rust projects to be widely adopted for replacing a big portion of copyleft libraries. This coreutils project was just an example to make the point, it seems very convenient and it is easy to dismiss the licencing choice as a coincidence. On the long term this might have huge implications a few generations ahead when big corps don't have to contribute nothing anymore to society. Look at what is happening with ~~Open~~CloseAI, open source models are lagging behind because there nothing equivalent to GNU/Copyleft in this field, thus we end up with a big corp mostly owned by Microsoft holding a life changing technology in its hands and hindering the progress of all society.

However, it’s still definitely not proportionate to the value that the community contributes back and basically gives to the corporations for free with most of them packaging these libraries and binaries and selling their software for much higher profit without ever contributing anything back.

I think you massively underestimate how much corporations contribute to OSS technology. Even the linux kernel has over 80% of contributions being from people paid to do so:

The number of paid developers is on the rise, as companies aggressively recruit top Linux talent. More than 80 percent of kernel development is done by developers who are being paid for their work. Volunteer developers tend not to stay that way for long.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/the-linux-foundation-releases-linux-development-report

If you removed all that support, and everything RedHat, Canonical etc have done then the Linux land scape would be baron today. Hell even Debian is basically backed by corporate sponsors to fund their work.

And after all of that, if corporations did not use Linux or any OSS projects at all then there would be far fewer people getting introduced to it at work, then wanting to contribute back in their spare time.

So even if companies take far more then they give back, they also give back far more than people doing it for the love of the software. And while some companies might be much more of a leach off what OSS provides, overall corporations give a lot back to the OSS movement.

the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses became the de facto standard, and that was without much pressure from the big corporations, though rust has its origins under the umbrella of Mozilla so it’s not that surprising given this context.

There is actually a big pressure here, libraries under the GPL are very toxic to companies (binaries, like the kernel, much less so). If you base an entire core of a languages library under the GPL then no major company would ever touch that language. This would basically doom the language to a forever niche language. All major languages have a huge amount contributed to them via companies - most having been created by companies to begin with. Most of the popular libraries are written by people who are hired to write in that language and write these things if not while they are being paid to do so then because they might want to use the libraries during their jobs.

The LGPL might have mitigated this a bit, but companies are still wary of it. And every barrier put up would stunt the languages growth.

We live in a world dominated by corporations and what they do - volunteer effort (while still valuable) is just a drop in the ocean. A software license wont change this, but can have dramatic consequences on your product depending on what it is you are developing. And the GPL is not always the right choice for a project, especially a library.