Developers behind Redox OS, the original open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language, have ported Wayland to it with initially getting the Smallvil Wayland compositor up and running along with the Smithay framework and the Wayland version of the GTK toolkit.
The Redox OS project published their November 2025 status update where one of their main accomplishments for the past month is getting these initial Wayland components up and running on it. Before getting too excited though, they note that the Wayland compositor’s performance is “not adequate” and thus more work to do on their Wayland support but an exciting first milestone
Here I came expecting to hear from the Rust-haters and the Wayland-haters, and instead I got to hear from the MIT License-haters!
I think I have a bit more nuanced feelings on the MIT license. If I actually write something useful, GPL all the way, baby!
However, I don’t necessarily think the MIT license is the embodiment of evil; I find GPL a bit overkill for hobby projects. I’m not talking things that have the potential to become critical pieces of infrastructure like a kernel or something; I’m more talking about emoji pickers or hacky little Python scripts that would be pretty useless to a Fortune 500. In the minute chance someone actually cares about my silly little toy to fork it, I see very little point in encumbering it with the full heft of a copyleft license and stopping them from doing whatever the heck they want.
On a technical level, that’s cool.
On a practical level MIT-licensed OS better not get much mindshare. Cue everything that happened with important projects under permissive licenses over the last decade. E.g. Android, Chromium. I used to dgaf and was even quite excited about stuff like Fuscia OS. Boy did we dodge a bullet there with Google abandoning it.
Android and Chromium. Is listing two projects that were created almost entirely by the same company and gifted to the Open Source world the best way to make your point? I mean, they sure are shafting us with Kubernetes too right?
I would say that Google is screwing us with Clang and LLVM except Apple and Microsoft contribute a lot to that too so they deserve some of the blame.
But, I mean clearly GCC is the better project. I mean sure LLVM resulted in Rust (corporate project), Swift (corporate project), and Zig but GCC is where the real innovation is. I mean GCC just added COBOL and Algol 68.
Chromium was created by the KDE community which needed HTML rendering in… the 90s? Then it was taken up by MS competitors who wanted to make a rival of Internet Explorer and they “created” WebKit. Nokia, Apple, BlackBerry, later Google and many others contributed to WebKit which became Safari and eventually Chrome. At one point Google broke off from that codebase to create Blink.
I’ll give you that you’ve got a decent narrative and I wouldn’t have objected much if Google was the “Don’t be evil” company it used to be in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Which is also when they acquired Danger and released their src as Android. We’re not in that world anymore. I don’t give a flying fuck where the innovation is because I can rely on GCC being here 50 years from now, when the current corporate players be long gone.
Again, I really wish we lived in 2015 when people (and I) trusted Google enough to make it trivial for me to advocate for their projects and products.
Yeah I’m a recent convert to less permissive licenses and was disappointed to see that redox was MIT. At the same time I know if I was to make anything worth open sourcing I couldn’t fight big tech if they decided to make use of it in a non-compliant way.
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy/
WARNING: Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MUST NOT be used at Google.
Yeah that’s the (public) policy, but there’s nothing stopping them from saying “we’re Google, we have a literal army of lawyers at our disposal, and you can’t prove shit. Even if you could prove shit, we would find a way to keep doing what we’re doing through some loophole that you can’t afford to fight us on”
KHtml was massacred :/
KHtml was massacred
KHTML was forked. And kept open source. And the fork was so successful that even KDE switched to it (voluntarily).
And Apple employed a bunch of the KHTML developers for years. They still do I assume.
Oh, and one of them is now creating what will probably be the most successful independent web browser project ever—Ladybird.
Solid example.
Indeed. The hard lesson that I learned over my 20 years of experience with FOSS is that the social infrastructure around a piece of software is more important than the exact details of the technology itself such as programming languages, frameworks, patterns, etc. And the license is a part of that social infrastructure.
True of corpo software as well, FWIW.
Corporate ghouls will buy a successful company and stuff the “leadership” with an even mix of hapless morons and toxic careerists, then wonder why the successful products aren’t selling anymore.
Or so I heard, dear $currentEmployer whose corporate values I definitely share.
For sure. I’m considering corpo software as a liability by definition.
distributed under an MIT License
Pass. Why are people so stupid?
You prefer GPL?
I know I do.
GPL forces mega corps to give back when they use community code.
MIT just lets companies take community code without giving anything back.
GPL code is code for the community by the community. Meta crops can use the code too but they have to give back.
Choosing MIT over GPL, LGPL, or MPL (all community oriented) in my book is pretty close to corporate bootlicking.
GPL code is code for the community by the community.
Lets list some GPL code developed on servers owned and operated by IBM (because they are the core developers):
- Glibc
- GCC
- binutuls
- GNU CoreUtils
- systemd
- pipewire
- Podman
- Flatpak
- elfutils
Do you use any of those? About half of those projects were started by IBM. It was them that chose the GPL as a license. I wonder who forced them?
Who are the Top Contributors to the Linux kernel?
- Intel
- Red Hat
- Oracle
Ya, let’s keep those mega corps from using all that GPL code that YOU write.
FreeBSD just released a new version. It is entirely permissively licensed. It is clearly an anomaly that half the new features in this release have the names of companies that contributed them in the release notes. Who are these Netflix people?
I would say “how about gaming” but very little of that code is GPL. Any permissively licensed code used in gaming?
- WINE
- proton
- Xorg
- Wayland
- Mesa
- FEX
- LLVM
To your point, those projects must have been totally stolen by greedy mega corps right? I mean, X has been around for decades so there has been lots of time to push Xorg out of the market.
These Valve guys are big in gaming. Surely they must be stealing all our code and not giving back right? I mean, only the license would stop them (as you say). Obviously they took that MIT WINE thing and made Proton proprietary.
Right?
Companies are allowed to participate in the community. They are wallowed to use community code. Companies donating servers and resources is actually a good thing. This includes Valve. The “greediness” you talk about isn’t a factor.
Also factually none of those projects you listed were started by IBM. Half of them were started by GNU foundation. The other half were started by Redhat before it was acquired by IBM.
The way Redhat made money was by taking community code and packaging it with support guarantees for other companies. Redhat took that money and hired people to further improve that community code they were packaging. I was at Redhat at the time.
Regarding freeBSD you are forgetting the literal largest user of BSD in the world. Netflix voluntarily gives back code to the community but they aren’t forced to.
Sony is the largest user of FreeBSD in the world. They take the code. Use it improve it and give nothing back. From the PS3 forward all of their devices are based on FreeBSD.
Microsoft also is a large user of FreeBSD in a way. When they couldn’t add a proper networking stack to Windows without everything crashing all the time they’re turned to FreeBSD. Microsoft ripped out the networking code and glued it into Windows 2000. From there we got XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and now 11. All with community code taken and used to fight community coded operating systems.
I guess it all comes down to how you see companies. If you believe that companies will always act in the interest of the community even at the expense of competitiveness I can see how one might see MIT or BSD licenses as adequate.
GPL, LGPL, and MPL on the other hand force companies to give back when they take.
I don’t trust companies enough to use MIT. I choose GPL, LGPL, and MPL.
If a company intended to give back to the community there is no reason why they would not use GPL, LGPL, or MPL. They intend to tie back anyways. Right? MIT just lets them keep their taking but not giving options open.
