Proprietary code goes unpublished – but no FOSS package ever dies. //

Proprietary code goes unpublished: if its host company dies, it probably dies with it the moment the servers are wiped.

Open source's default mode is life. The code is published, cloned, archived by default. It may be abandoned to lie dormant, like a tardigrade sitting out a drought in suspended animation, but drop the water of attention on it and it's back in the game. At least, that's the theory. //

Ledru started the project for very personal reasons: as a director at Mozilla, he was surrounded by Rust creators in an entirely managerial job, and he wanted to learn Rust. Reinventing coreutils, for him, was primarily fun; he learned the thinking behind the beginning of modern computing. Plus, it seemed to be something worth doing.

Last year, the package started to get a reputation for robustness, and was finding its way into production in some significant places. It had attracted hundreds of contributors, it had some performance advantages, and it has a more permissive license – MIT in place of GPL. You can do that if you re-invent. //

The real joy of this is that it's been so organic. One person's itch to learn and code found its salve in a project that few thought needed to be done. But in ten or 20 years' time, it will need to have been done. None of the reasons for this have any place in the proprietary, metrics-driven goal world of closed source.

The end result is that an essential and massively used set of tools from 50 years ago will be just as essential and just as used 50 years hence. To the many freedoms FOSS grants, we can add that of looking ahead as far as you can see and quietly start the business of evolution to fit.

There's a core utility for you. ®