I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don’t see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It’s like they’re painting their faces with “here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine”
As I said there are many alternative coreutils (BSD utils, toybox) for the embrace extend extinguish. I just don’t see a model situation because that seems to me like embracing, extending and extinguishing a programming language. Nobody does that because it is not financially viable.
It’s not required to do work, if you want to use GPL licensed software for commercial applications. You need to share your source code, if you modified the GPLed code. But most people don’t modify the coreutils’ code. Are coreutils getting so much work done on them? To me it does not seem like it when this new uutils project managed to dwarf them in performance in some benchmarks.
Anyways I think I’ve read somewhere that the project author is open to change the license, if the contributors want to. I guess someone could open a discussion about it. The issue is that it cannot be people from this comment section because they cannot engage in an adult discussion. I do think it’s worth considering the advantages of changing the license to GPL, mainly that users will be forced to share their potential bug fixes. But people have to cut their Canonical conspiracy crap, which just does not make any sense and only makes it harder to convince the uutils author.
There’s no conspiracy, just people learning their lessons from years of abuse at the hands of corporations.