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
Lol, very first pair of comments. I love phoronix sometimes.
We like the Rust, we hate the cuck license. Simple.
You’re a rube if you think corporations can’t throw some money at interns do a rewrite in MIT and bypass GPL that way.
So let them do that. Why should we be doing their dirty work for them?
Unless we’re stupid.
Hmm sorry for calling you a Rube. You make a fair point.
Average Twitter post
I don’t understand what’s going on with the rust community insisting on cuck licences. Do they love writing on their Mac books so much?
I think a part of it may be that they are from the younger generation like myself, and most of them don’t really know the history of software and FOSS, and MIT is just a safe option for them. I think they haven’t really put in the time to read and undertstand the philosophy and logic behind FOSS and read the licenses and writings.
But why MIT? How come that became the default? Why not GPL? Is Microslop Github suggesting MIT by default?
I’m not sure but theres something in my mind bout MIT being the first suggested license for github.
and also, to be real, you need to do some reasearch and actually understand the GPL license if you want to use it for your project. But with MIT you can just slap it on there and forget. It’s convenient, but like a lot of conveniences, can be very bad.
Why do you need to do research for GPL? It’s the OG opensource license AFAIK that forces users to also opensource their stuff. MIT let’s anybody close source your code and make money with it.
GPL isn’t perfect as it doesn’t solve the funding problem, but MIT is about the worst thing one can do for opensource: do the work for companies, for free, and be OK with never contributing back to the opensource ecosystem.
The OG open-source license was when software was just shared as a convenience, as companies only sold the matching hardware. When AT&T started asking for license fees for UNIX, it all went downhill.
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.
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.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.
Businesses can already create their own forks of GPL-licensed software and not contribute their changes to the upstream project
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.
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.
