2d ago

Rust-Written Redox OS Sees Initial Wayland Port

www.phoronix.com

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

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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.
- For an OS, I'd say GPL is great. But for most other things, EPL is much more sane amd keeps the foss going
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.
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.
- 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.

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