You can not push a button to launch a nuke if they disable your hand!

Yeah, playing with it for fun to see what you can make it come up with is a perfectly reasonable use case, if it weren't for the environmental cost...

When I go on a bike ride, I don't constantly have people pulling beside me reminding that I could be driving in a car.

When I use cash, the person taking it does not remind me that I could have used a credit card.

When I open a container of oatmeal, there isn't a little piece of paper that springs out and reminds me I could be eating instantly ready breakfast cereal instead.

Call me old school, but I prefer my foss to be linear.

Being written in Rust has mixed effects. Rust is still less mainstream than C, so fewer people can contribute. However, it does attract more interest because it’s different.

Yes, it's "different". That is all that it has to offer: it's "different". There is no other reason why people might be interested in it.

However, the reasons why you create/contribute to new-but-similar projects is to add functionality that the original project doesn’t have.

Why is that the only reason to motivate someone to do such a thing?

So why are people (and Canonical) contributing so much labor to something that still doesn’t function as intended?

Maybe we should take them that they word that they are genuinely think that coreutils would be better if it were written in Rust? Why is that such a radical possibility?

I say it’s the licensing.

Yes, I have noticed that you are very big on saying what others' motivations are.

So the fact that it is written in Rust has absolutely nothing to do with it?

I don't know where you are getting "a decade" from, but assuming we are using the percentage of passing tests as our metric of the percentage of "what coreutils does"--which is dubious, but it's your metric so let's go with that for the moment--we see in the very same plot that just four years ago it only did 25 percent of "what coreutils does", so clearly significantly more has happened in the last four years than did in the previous six, rather the project being worked on equally hard for the entire time.

Also, you seem to imply that it shouldn't have taken them "a decade" to get accomplish "85 percent of what coreutils does", but that raises the question: exactly how long should it have taken exactly? Can you cite evidence that it took significantly less time for coreutils to get to the point where it accomplished "85 percent of what coreutils does" today? If not, then there is no basis of comparison we can use to decide whether a decade is a long time or not to have gotten to this point.

At least they eventually closed that barn door!

I appreciated this insightful essay for explaining where each side is coming from, why being different is okay, and how this ties in to a bigger picture, rather than being a standard opinionated rant.

Man, I bet that, when this guy watched The Ring, the first thought that came into his mind was that the characters were being idiots by not making as many copies of the tape as possible and then selling them!

The prospect is definitely tempting, but the problem is that the market can remain irrational for longer than I can remain solvent...

Yeah, and this policy is especially nonsensical when you consider that in most cases the programs were actually written in C.