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
Because we are users, contributors, packagers, distributors… and if the project is unsustainable and suddenly becomes proprietary that is bad.
Or if the project is included in proprietary systems. Nobody will have the right to get source code then, or in case of GPLv3 even the right to install other software.
Copyleft and GPLv3 grant users the rights to prevent e-waste or replace shitty proprietary software on useful hardware with better one.
Copyleft licenses spread these rights, while permissive ones do nothing apart from handing out software for nothing in return.
So, in your opinion, should these developers simply stop their work on this project of they are not willing to use the GPL?
No, but as they do great work it is a shame that they dont protect it and thereby reduce the protection of every distro shipping them
Fair enough. I do actually get the concern, though I think that the threat is being exaggerated. However, I would argue that, if the goal is not to try and get these developers to abandon their efforts, then it does not make sense for every single discussion to get flooded with the same complaints about the license to the point that not much else seems to get talked about.