If you link to GPL library, your software has to be GPL. You are confusing it with LGPL. Though you can bypass this by making the library its own standalone app. Like let’s say FFmpeg which is just a frontend for libAV libraries. (ignore that these libraries are actually LGPL, so you can link to them.)

The author explicitly states that this is not the reason.

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/discussions/4358#discussioncomment-8027681

Bruh instead of all this speculation, you guys could have just looked it up.

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/discussions/4358#discussioncomment-8027681

I will give you one. You want to embed the coreutils in some other projects ie. a browser. But at that point it’s cheaper for you to submit your modification upstream because you are making money selling the browser not by selling modified coreutils. Maintaining your own fork is not worth it once you make meaningful changes.

I think this is the reason why uutils are being funded by Big Tech and why they chose this license. (to get funded) correction: I only found that they are funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund and apparently the author is open to changing the license, they don’t care (see video/presentation).

But yes, I agree this whole comment section is deranged. The reason why Ubuntu chose uutils is because of Rust’s safety and because of speed. In some workloads (I think it’s sorting) they totally smash the GNU counterparts.

For Ubuntu it does not make any sense to make a proprietary fork. You don’t choose your OS based on its coreutils. If they added a new convenience flag for their proprietary grep, it would just make them look bad. Also skilled users would hate it because now their scripts would not be portable. Or if it were really that big of a gamechanger, the feature would get added to the other coreutils and Ubuntu would end up with nothing but bad reputation. Unless they made change to the underlying code for performance. Then it would be harder to implement in the other coreutils but as I said before, nobody would care. Faster and safer coreutils are a nice to have, not something people base their OS choice on.

Edit: added source to author’s stance on license

It’s not recommended because there are better options ie. Arch, not that it would be impossible to learn linux using Void. Arch simply has better documentation than Void. Which is important when you want to learn fast. My previous comments provided examples why the documentation is worse.

Btw arch wiki does provide documentation for runit but only on its runit page, not on every page that mentions managing a service.

Not talking about the quality of the software. I mean that some guide on Arch wiki will not work because some software expects systemd or the guide is just more difficult to follow with a system using runit. My point is that a new user does not have “the context”, so for a new user Void is a worse way to learn linux quickly than Arch or honestly even Gentoo. Even Gentoo has its own wiki so it’s likely that if an Arch wiki guide does not work for you, you will likely find the Gentoo specific detail on their wiki. You don’t have such luxury with Void.

For novices Void is worse because it does not have the Arch wiki. The Void Docs are brief and you will inevitably end up reading the Arch wiki anyways, except you will run into Runit specific bs.