Disclaimer: I pretty much don't like Rust, but most criticism of it boils down to culture war.

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[–] 79 points 8 months ago* (12 children)

Why would a programming language destroy an operating system?

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  • [–] 46 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    No, no, the architectures! The Debian architecture (apparently)!

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  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago

    Processor architectures maybe. They put Rust into Debian and it's so bad that now e.g. amd64 is ruined forever for any OS and won't see any new processors in the future. We'll have to move to a different architecture. I didn't watch the video since I treasure my brain cells too much but that's what I choose to read into it.

    (A more reasonable reading is that Debian now ships a kernel that includes Rust code and coincidentally has also dropped builds for several obscure architectures but I do not feel obliged to assume reason with a title and thumbnail like that.)

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Partly it's more of "destroy an ecosystem". Among languages, Rust is at the frontlines of a continuing trend to remove GPL-licensed, community toolkits and put corporate-friendly, AI-friendly toolkits in their place, eg.: replacing grep with openaigrep, which would basically be step 2 in the process of privatizing or corporatizing the Linux ecosystem (and leads to the loss of a number of user freedoms).

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Licenses don't matter when corpos don't care anyways. Especially for training LLMs. They don't care about copyright. I choose to use tools based on there merits over simply going "it has my favorite license." Even though I say that, I still prefer AGPL even though I understand that of the corpos want to steal, they'll steal it.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    That's true, for now.

    Licenses might not matter now but if enough of a communal current for respect of licenses and of punishment for license breaking ramps up, we might be able to see something like (L)GPL class action suits against large corporations, at which point it becomes possible to at least seek reparation for previous damages.

    But as with anything and everything law-related, licenses are declarations of intent. Their validity is only substantiated by the holder's capacity to pursue punishment.

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