On 02/09/2025 12:58, Davide Biondi via Dng wrote:
> It is never about safety, it is always about control, especially when
> big corps and political organizations talk about "safety".
> Rust is a sophisticated form of "cyber-entrism", as far as
> I am concerned. My point is:
>
> Why has a language so young, untested, and immature been implemented in
> a project as old, complicated, and critical as the Linux kernel itself?

My point of view is that we want open source contributors to be good actors and
the GPL does not help with that and just erects walls to good actors that need
to make a living primarily and contribute because they want to. I dismissed your
point at first and I guess as any contributed MIT or ISC (new BSD) code would be
infected by the kernels GPL then maybe I still do.

However it certainly seems true that significant money was put behind full time
engineers to build kernel integration when for example Ada would have been a
better choice and less work. Whether that is simply wanting Rust and a more
secure language to replace C or something more nefarious is an interesting
question. I would suggest the former though I guess some kind of argument could
be made that as MIT/BSD contributions must retain their license but be infected
by the GPL then perhaps it could be used if many parts become sourced as MIT as
an argument to make the kernel MIT/ISC or a new Microsoft Linux kernel be easier
to make under a non GPL license but I think that is unlikely. Another thing is
Microsoft could build a proprietary OS around GPL'd Linux in any case so long as
they contribute back to just the kernel part. Perhaps you could argue that it
gives them more to cherry pick from such as the tcp/ip stack that Microsoft have
struggled to make work on Windows as well as it does on Unix.