Sylvestre Ledru who serves as the lead developer of the uutils project for the Rust Coreutils implementation presented at FOSDEM 2026 this weekend on this initiative. Ledru has spoken at FOSDEM in prior years on Rust Coreutils and this year’s talk focused primarily on Ubuntu 25.10’s adoption of it in place of GNU Coreutils.
Ledru’s presentation covered the progress made on Rust Coreutils in recent times and Ubuntu 25.10’s uptake of Rust Coreutils and continuing that for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. While some bugs have been found as a result of it, they have been fixed rather quickly. Ledru’s presentation also points out some of the popular trolling around Rust Coreutils and ultimately how many of those commenters have been proven wrong
You are very right. While non-copyleft licences makes sense for some software (a game engine like Godot, for example, released under the MIT licence) it’s absolutely awful for the coreutils.
Why? BSD has an equivalent to coreutils with BSD license.
I wasn’t aware that the coreutils software was changing its license?
As far as I know uutils has always been under an mit licence, hasn’t it?
In your comment you said:
My (admittedly, facetiously made) point is that coreutils is already GPL, and it’s not like it is going away.