This would be really exciting if Canonical weren’t using this in part because it helps them de-GPL their Linux distro.
Inb4 people say that it’s impossible to do anything shitty and if they did, people would just fork 😴 That isn’t how it works. Defaults matter and most people aren’t going to go out of their way to learn about this or replace their distro when they start locking it down.
The notion that a modern Linux desktop is GNU is pure fiction.
You posted this from Firefox or a chromium/BLINK based browser! => not GNU
You use X11 libs or libwayland => not GNU
mesa => not GNU
openssl or nss => not GNU (check your system libcurl for me, does your distro build it against gnutls?)
openssh => not GNU (obviously)
fontconfig, freetype, harfbuzz => not GNU (freetype is dual-licenced)
zlib, bzip2, brotli, zstd => not GNU (gzip is, zstd is dual-licensed)
libjpeg, libpng, libvpx, libaom => not GNU
(neo)vim, tmux => not GNU (who still uses screen?!)
and I could go on and on and on
Even when it comes to ntp implementations, OpenNTPD and NTPsec are not GNU. gpsd, one of the three projects mentioned by Canonical, is not GNU (the other two are).
(all software mentioned above sans browsers is written in C btw)
Even GCC is almost fully replaceable now. The only strong holdout is glibc (musl is no match, and doesn’t pretend to be anyway). And surprise surprise, it is not going to be replaced, not anytime soon anyway.
I don’t disagree, but I’m also not focused on the GNU aspect of this. In many cases, non-GNU stuff, like MUSL is actually better (in my opinion). My issue is with non-copyleft licenses. I’ve written alternatives to various GNU utilities because I find some of their behavior to be undesirable, but I license them under the GPL because I think that the alternatives are a net negative on society.
And I think that Canonical, like any other profit-driven entity, will do anything to increase their profit, and when they think they can get away with something shitty and they believe it will make more money, they’ll do that. Pushover licenses give them the option to restrict things more than if they relied on copyleft tools.