I feel like this shouldn't be surprising. If you use GPL, you give others strong incentive to rewrite an alternative, because GPL is just very heavy burden. I'd even go as far as to say this is an example of failure of GPL. If the intent was to set up incentives to make sure people share the improvements with the community for mutual benefit, but the result is an incentive to rather burn resources to do complete rewrites, then that seems like a failure on all sides to me.
It's not a heavy burden at all. Releasing source code is quick and easy. Github will host it for you for free. The issue isn't the burden. The issue is that they don't want to comply with the license. Let's cut the crap. This is an attack on the four essential freedoms by means of replacement of the foundational libraries. If you want to talk about burning resources to do complete rewrites, let's start with uutils.
