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
Replace a perfectly usable GPL software for MIT? Nope. I used to fall for that ten years ago. The social infrastructure of software is more important than the exact tech used. The license is fundamental to that.
What did you replace Xorg with 10 years ago?
Not the person you asked but kwin the GPL licensed Wayland compositor. Why do you ask?
Nothing. Still use it to present day. I generally trust the selection of OS software to the distro developers - Debian and Ubuntu for me. We constantly use software that doesn’t perfecty fit our requirements or wants.
I wasn’t aware that coreutils was going somewhere.
The availability of a replacement with a permissive license allows businesses to use it without giving anything back to the community.
What this leads to in the long run is open source projects starved for resources, and businesses pouring their dev time only into their own business-specific forks, without sharing their code upstream.
We’ve played this game with browser engines and we find ourselves in a world with no viable community-controlled browser.
Read a thread on rust forum about this and my impression is that most folks fall in two ideological categories. Either “No politic here” or some form of libertarianism. I understand where both come from as I’ve gone through some form of either, and I think both are transitional for many people. I used to roll my eyes hard at people making license arguments. We’re past the point where tech corporations were playing nice with people. As they keep shitting on products and take more and more of people’s work without returning anything, more and more people from those two camps would come to the realization that everything is political and the social infrastructure of open source - the infrastructure that gets more people to do labour for a project - is what creates and keeps open source alive over the long haul. The excitement that a new language or framewwok creates is fleeting. The GPL-MIT/BSD/Apache/etc divide isn’t so much one of exact guarantees and legal rights, it is some of that, but more importantly it’s a political statement of intent.
Where would you say Firefox fits into this? (This question is not a gotchya; I am genuinely having trouble seeing whether it is a valid counter-example or not.)
The way I see (Mozilla) Firefox is a project whose devekopment is funded by its competitor - (Google/Alphabet) Chrome - so that there’s plausible deniability against anti-trust enforcement, the kinds of which Microsoft was subjected to some decades ago. I don’t think it’s a self-sustaining community project like say Debian is. Still use it over Chromium. Funnily, Chromium is a descendent of an organic community project - KHTML - that got extended and eventually taken over by our friendly familiar corporations.
Those are all good points.
Businesses can already create their own forks of GPL-licensed software and not contribute their changes to the upstream project; in fact, they do not even have to share their code with anyone at all if they use it internally do not distribute binaries. However, they are incentivized to share their changes, even if they do not have to, because if they do not then merging upstream changes will become increasingly difficult.
No they can’t, at least not legally. Part of using GPL software is that you need to include the GPL with any changes you make.
It’s the entire point of the license and the concept behind copyleft.
Reread that quote, and you will see that I was saying that just because they are required to distribute the source code with binaries–which they are only required to do if they distribute binaries–does not mean that they have to take any steps to contribute the changes they’ve made to the upstream project.
You’re partially right. They don’t have to “contribute back” by submitting pull requests or something similar.
They do have to contribute back by making their changes publicly available. Whether upstream uses those changes is up to them.
I’m going to ignore you now since all of your replies have shown me you’re a moron. Peace.
I would rather be a moron than someone who calls for others to be tarred and feathered over their choice of an open source software license of all things.