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
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.
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!
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.
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.
Yeah that’s the (public) policy, but there’s nothing stopping them from saying “we’re Google, we have a literal army of lawyers at our disposal, and you can’t prove shit. Even if you could prove shit, we would find a way to keep doing what we’re doing through some loophole that you can’t afford to fight us on”
KHtml was massacred :/
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.
True of corpo software as well, FWIW.
Corporate ghouls will buy a successful company and stuff the “leadership” with an even mix of hapless morons and toxic careerists, then wonder why the successful products aren’t selling anymore.
Or so I heard, dear $currentEmployer whose corporate values I definitely share.
For sure. I’m considering corpo software as a liability by definition.
