Eh, I don’t see the issue here. The MIT license is fine for a few reasons:
attractive to lots of FOSS projects, like BSDs, Redox, etc
no incentive to embed into proprietary projects - ls, cp, etc aren’t particularly interesting to embed, and functionality is usually better in the stdlib of whatever language you’re using
increases appeal generally for research purposes
I really don’t see much benefit of GPL here. It makes sense for larger works with interesting snippets of code, but not for small, one-off tools like this.
If the other projects are licensed with a GPL, there is no issue doing any of these things (except using them for proprietary purposes later), which is the point. If you licensed your project incorrectly, that isn’t the GPL-licensed project’s fault.
Right, because the GPL is viral, forcing everything to be GPL-compatible or you’ll have problems. Some FOSS licenses aren’t GPL-compatible, notably the CDDL used for OpenZFS, which is why it has been a part of FreeBSD but not Linux (and it’s available now outside the kernel).
The GPL makes more sense the more “application-y” your project is, but if you want it used more broadly, more permissive licenses make more sense. Yes, the LGPL exists, but there are still a ton of caveats to it.
The code in something like coreutils isn’t all that useful generally, so protecting it with the GPL doesn’t bring a ton of value, whereas a more permissive license could.
I like the GPL and its variants and I use it from time to time. I also like the MIT and similar permissive licenses, and I use them as well. Use the right license for the use case. I think the MIT is fine here.
Eh, I don’t see the issue here. The MIT license is fine for a few reasons:
I really don’t see much benefit of GPL here. It makes sense for larger works with interesting snippets of code, but not for small, one-off tools like this.
If the other projects are licensed with a GPL, there is no issue doing any of these things (except using them for proprietary purposes later), which is the point. If you licensed your project incorrectly, that isn’t the GPL-licensed project’s fault.
Right, because the GPL is viral, forcing everything to be GPL-compatible or you’ll have problems. Some FOSS licenses aren’t GPL-compatible, notably the CDDL used for OpenZFS, which is why it has been a part of FreeBSD but not Linux (and it’s available now outside the kernel).
The GPL makes more sense the more “application-y” your project is, but if you want it used more broadly, more permissive licenses make more sense. Yes, the LGPL exists, but there are still a ton of caveats to it.
The code in something like coreutils isn’t all that useful generally, so protecting it with the GPL doesn’t bring a ton of value, whereas a more permissive license could.
I like the GPL and its variants and I use it from time to time. I also like the MIT and similar permissive licenses, and I use them as well. Use the right license for the use case. I think the MIT is fine here.