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
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/
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.