from Hacker News

Maintainer of Rust crate 'dirs-sys' intentionally poisons dependents with MPL

by rustman123 on 1/24/24, 9:08 AM with 2 comments

• by rustman123 on 1/24/24, 9:08 AM

  They intentionally added a copyleft-licensed library (options-ext) written by himself to poison the supply chain via `dirs-sys`. (Commit: https://github.com/dirs-dev/dirs-sys-rs/commit/e169da7af901e...)

  The dependency adds nothing of value and can trivially be removed. (https://github.com/dirs-dev/dirs-sys-rs/pull/22/files)

  When asked about it, they claim to prefer MPL and that the current license was an accident they 'may or may not correct'.

  Popular dependents include - cross (https://crates.io/crates/cross) - terminfo (https://crates.io/crates/terminfo)

• by cpburns2009 on 1/24/24, 2:14 PM

  MPL 2.0 is not a "viral" license like the GPL. It is cross compatible with both Apache 2.0 and MIT. The knee jerk reaction to drop dirs-sys-rs over a non-existent licensing issue makes no sense.