GPL or bust
this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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What about MPL? That seen more accepted in the rust space.
Agreed though, I don't know what the obsession with some of rust based GNU project placement stuff on going backwards on copyleft. Like I want to contribute to the next Linux not the next base for an Apple to take over and write a nice foot note about.
Don't be so negative. Apple donated over 1,000$ back to FreeBSD in 2021: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationType=individual&donationYear=2021
@OsrsNeedsF2P
That was mockery at best! Multi-trillion $ company donates 1000 $?
They couldn't make it to the Silver or at least Bronze donor? FBSD has three individuals as Silver!
Apple deserves all negativity it gets, not just for that, but as cry-baby patent-trolls, anti-repair efforts and such.
What benefit would it provide though? It's a microkernel so you could just add non-free drivers in the userspace. Things like Playstation would choose BSD instead.
It would at least protect the core parts of the kernel itself
Sure but protect from what? Apple, Sony and Microsoft can just use BSD or any other proprietary kernel. Nobody will try to create the "new proprietary Linux" out of it because getting OS market share is hard even for an Open Source standard like Linux, let alone for some proprietary crap.
A potential issue is someone like Qualcom who makes their own proprietary fork which works on their hardware only. So instead of digging through the tens of thousand lines of code which Qualcom publishes for their out of tree Linux kernels, you can only reverse engineer. But again we are talking about a microkernel so most of these lines of code would be proprietary regardless. At least we save time of these crazy developers who try to bring out of tree stuff into mainline.
It stops parts of Linux becoming proprietary, and becoming the dominant version users interact with. Comparisons with other kernels are irrelevant
Comparisons with other kernels is imo relevant. Protecting software that has many alternatives from becoming proprietary is nice but not really important when the potential software vendor can just choose a different but equivalent project. It would not really matter if people interacted with this proprietary fork of RedoxOS or BSD, they would get screwed either way.
Note: the original comment was "GPL or bust". imo GPL is nice but in this case it's a minor thing
Harder GPL. Like v3 something.
If your point is that it would need some kind of license that would prevent proprietary drivers, then I'm not really sure how would lawyers differentiate between drivers and straight up non-free apps running on it.
GPL v3 prevents mechanisms that interfere with the ability of the end user to replace the free firmware of a device, like accepting only signed firmwares. It’s an “anti-TiVo” thing. It won’t prevent proprietary drivers, but any device distributed with it must not prevent the user from making their own drivers to replace them.
There isn’t a real solution that would work for user space drivers. At least not yet. But just like GPL v3 rose from TiVo, if this becomes an issue I’m sure the lawyers of FSF will come up with something, and Linus and a lot of other folk will hate it.
Yeah that makes sense but does not really fit with the theme "GPL or bust" since Linux itself does not use v3
We’re talking about Redox OS, not Linux.
I am aware. I was just pointing out that Tivotization would be a weird reason for "a bust" when we are in a linux community and Linux itself does not prevent Tivotization.
Redox doesnt seem secure at all to me, i tried it out in a VM today and there was a publicly accessible file at the root of the file system containing unhashed credentials
Very interesting, please report that to them, it may be because of some experimental stage.
For example an installation media needs some form of accessible first user creation. Anaconda etc may be more advanced here.
I imagine their focus is elsewhere. They probably just wanted a proof of concept login system to test things.
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The biggest lie of programming these days is just because something is coded in [trendy "secure" language of the day, including Rust] means it's secure. Bullcrap. It's how you code things that make it secure or not. You can be proficient enough in C to make programs that are much more secure vs. rust. The fact that everyone makes mistakes and programming is an enormous beast to wrangle with makes things insecure and needs to be monitored and fixed.
You're just partially correct.
With Rust you get compile time guarantees that your code doesn't have a specific class of vulnerabilities. Can you do that with C?
Nope, rust is ideal for kernel code, it really is an improvement.
Writing kernel in C is like building a house with a hammer on loosen handle, there is too much give and the builder has to tap it a few times before every strike. You could say the builder knows how to build and secure a house, but hes still a human. The loosen handle adds too much difficulty result in errors which would otherwise be avoided.
The rust standard lib uses unsafe in various places too. Even if you avoided every other category of error in your code logic, you could still end up with UB.