The uutils project announced tonight the release of Rust Coreutils 0.3, another step forward for this Rust version alternative to GNU Coreutils that has been attracting a lot of interest lately due to Ubuntu 25.10 now using it by default.
Rust Coreutils 0.3 brings improved GNU test suite compatibility with now passing 532 tests, or nearly an 84% pass rate. There is improved error handling and other updates to better match the behavior of GNU Coreutils… Such as the recently noted date issue breaking Ubuntu 25.10’s unattended upgrades.
I’m curious, what’s the worst case scenario in your eyes? I struggle to see why anyone would closed-fork it, or what threat it would pose if they did.
A rust rewrite of these tools has a lot of potential commercial value, and I can totally see a cloud provider like AWS putting this into some “hardened cloud AI distro” or whatever. They’ll be able to do exactly what they did to Elastic Search, or do the EEE thing and add bugfixes/features that they don’t contribute back in order to make their offering more competitive, make minor changes to the CLI as a lock-in strategy, etc.
Not licensing this as GPL will inevitably lead to the erosion of freedoms for everyone.