Soooo, according to a /g/ thread, the weird push to rewrite everything in Rust is actually a ruse by the corpos to get rid of the GPL licensing for the old stuff and have everything under the MIT cuck license so they can do absolutely whatever they want with the code?
@coolboymew but they already do whatever they want
anyone who thinks GPL is holding back some megacorp is delusional
anyone who thinks GPL is holding back some megacorp is delusional
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@deprecated_ii Years ago, I was tasked with checking the licenses of every library and framework we used on a project and find replacements for those that were under the GPL.
So, yeah, it does hold megacorps back.
@deprecated_ii @josemanuel @coolboymew Nor is corporations abiding by GPL necessarily the Freedom Increasing outcome many advocates like to claim it is (see for example how Artifex and parts of Oracle have built their entire business model around copyright trolling with AGPLv3)
@netdoll @deprecated_ii @josemanuel @coolboymew I think this is a little different, before there was a very cool C compiler, TCC, it could even compile a kernel quickly, on old hardware, now we have a raster that is not quite suitable for old hardware, because no one will rewrite the old drivers for x86 processors, or mips, they will most likely want to remove all backward compatibility for old computers, for example gnu-utils will be rewritten for raster, the old hardware will not receive gnu-utils updates, the old hardware will have the latest version in C as I understand this situation
@gamercat @coolboymew @deprecated_ii @josemanuel That's just the complexity race in general. LLVM is a travesty and so is most modern corpo software, but modern versions of GNU software aren't necessarily better in this regard and in the end it's all about which design tradeoffs you're willing to make to support which platforms and usecases.
@netdoll @deprecated_ii @josemanuel @coolboymew I just mean that a lot of old processor architectures and add-ons like cd drive, old wifi cards (a lot of old laptops will suffer here), etc. will not be rewritten to rust
@gamercat @coolboymew @deprecated_ii @josemanuel Linux is already dropping support for quite a bit of hardware because of internal reorganization and refactoring so "rewrite it in Rust" isn't even something I'd worry about relative to what's happening in the here and now. Like just to name the most obvious example off the top of my head, ATI Rage 128 and S3 SuperSavage support just recently got removed from the kernel. Both of those graphics cards were heavily used in turn of the century computing hardware (Apple loved the Rage and for S3's part they found their way into a lot of laptops). I feel like to a certain extent now, if you're dealing with hardware that old, you need to be running systems specifically tailored to it, and that means commodity Linux is out the window, regardless your other feelings on it. (NetBSD and OpenBSD both are more optimistic in this respect, 9front ofc, and there might also be the small matter of a deliberate "retro" Unix + userland sometime in the nearish future, like the 2.11BSD ports but more scaled up)
@netdoll @deprecated_ii @josemanuel @coolboymew And yes despite 2.11bsd is from 1992, and despite this, it is used for example to port it to stm32 microcontrollers
https://github.com/chettrick/discobsd
https://github.com/chettrick/discobsd
@gamercat @coolboymew @deprecated_ii @josemanuel 2.11BSD is actually still maintained and getting patches, it's probably the single longest lasting genetic Unix in current use
"Corporations decide to abide by GPL sometimes" is not the same thing as "corporations have to abide by GPL".