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

  • spartanatreyu@programming.dev
    1·
    10 hours ago

    If I were a uutils developer, I would stay far away from all of these discussions because of how much hate is directed towards it.

    I only see the hate towards this project being either from anti-rust trolls, or misdirected hate from Ubuntu towards switching to a new coreutils implementation on an LTS release before full compatibility has been achieved. I don’t see any hate in regards to licensing.

    If they do not adopt the license you prefer, would it be better for them to just go ahead and abandon the whole effort? Are there efforts really so valueless simply because they chose the license that they did?

    Their efforts have value, but the value is limited by its current license. MIT licenced projects have a recurring history of being improved privately without those improvements going back into the project. It leads to a lot of duplicated, wasted effort. There may also be the potential for patent issues with the licence. No one wants to deal with some litigious asshole or company going after the project turning it radioactive.

    Moreover, is dictating to volunteers what license they should be using for their code what you think this community should be about?

    I think bringing up issues with the project is definitely something that should be brought up. As for dictating which particular licence is used, that’s up to the contributors, but that doesn’t mean others can’t give their input. It’s also likely that most of the contributors will want a license that allows the project to safely continue into the future.

    You claim that it is important that people make tons noise in every single post on uutils because it will prevent a bad scenario down the line, but could you detail what that scenario is? Because people like to make allusions to such a scenario constantly but refuse to get specific and then engage on a discussion on the specifics.

    I thought the Redis example was a good example of this.

    I continue on this point further down, but I’m leaving this right now to stay on topic with redis.

    Incidentally, your choice of Redis is an example exactly illustrates my point that this license is not a gigantic deal it shows that the worst case scenario is… uutils being forked.

    The community was fractured. A report by an enterprise support company said 75% of existing redis users were motivated to seek alternatives. I’m not sure what number you would consider to be a gigantic deal, but Redis certainly thought it was, otherwise they would not have reverted back to the previous license.

    Heck, it can even be forked at any time with a copyleft license precisely because its existing language is permissive.

    It can be forked, but relicensing can mean needing permission from every contributor of the original, and/or removing all contributions from those who don’t agree to the new licence. Not to mention the community fracturing, and legal issues. It’s a massive effort that can be prevented by the original project choosing a better license earlier.

    You claim that it is important that people make tons noise in every single post on uutils because it will prevent a bad scenario down the line, but could you detail what that scenario is? Because people like to make allusions to such a scenario constantly but refuse to get specific and then engage on a discussion on the specifics.

    Well this comment is probably getting too long, so I’ll simply point you towards the busybox licensing drama.

    • bitcrafter@programming.dev
      1·
      44 minutes ago

      I agree that being concerned is reasonable. The reason for my fervor is that I find it unreasonable for every single discussion of uutils to be flooded with complaints about the license–that are often very toxic, e.g. reference to uutils using a “cuck license” as one commenter did above–to the point that there are few discussions of anything else.