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
GPL or GTFO! On a more serious note: Permissive licenses open a project up to unilateral exploitation by commercial entities and can lead to fractured ecosystems.
On a more principled note: permissive licenses (as compared to free software licenses) undermine the free software ecosystem and the freedoms it brings in the long term and the thing that uutils is doing - that is taking a GPL licensed project and rewriting it under a more permissive license is corrosive to free software. GPL applies not when corporations use a piece of software, but when they distribute binaries back to you. This is not about limiting the rights of corporations but about protecting the digital freedom of people.