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

    • OfCourseNot ( OfCourseNot@fedia.io ) 
      15·
      9 months ago

      You are very right. While non-copyleft licences makes sense for some software (a game engine like Godot, for example, released under the MIT licence) it’s absolutely awful for the coreutils.

              • spartanatreyu ( spartanatreyu@programming.dev ) 
                8·
                9 months ago

                So it needs to be commented on in every single article?

                Yes

                If so, is that going to change anything?

                Potentially.

                The alternative is not bringing up the concern and it goes forgotten until it is too late and we are stuck with the results of bad decisions for no good reason.

                Developers voicing their concerns is the only way things can change for the better.

                Here’s two examples:

                1. Redis licensing rug pull

                  • Redis unexpectly changed its own licencing
                  • Developers demanded Redis return to its original (or similar) licence
                  • Redis said no
                  • Developers formed their own Redis clones from scratch with compatible APIs
                  • Developers switched to the new Redis replacements
                  • Redis returned back to the original licence in an attempt to keep existing users

                2. Google’s JpegXL whiplash

                  • Google added support for jpegxl in Chrome
                  • Google removed support for jpegxl in Chrome in favour of inferior standards
                  • Developers demanded support added back
                  • Google said no
                  • Developers flooded every issue tracker and feature request with support for jpegxl, consistently, unrelentingly, for years
                  • Other browsers add support for jpegxl
                  • Creative industry adds support for jpegxl
                  • PDF association adds support for jpegxl
                  • Google forced choose between jpegxl or fall out of supporting pdf standard
                  • Google readds jpegxl support

                And there’s plenty of other examples (e.g. Microsoft against linux -> WSL support, etc…)

                If developers don’t voice their concerns, then things stop changing for the better.

                • bitcrafter ( bitcrafter@programming.dev ) 
                  1·
                  9 months ago

                  Whose opinion do you actually think is going to be changed? All I see here is a lot of preaching to the choir here. 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.

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

                  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.

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

      • Sivecano ( Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
        30·
        9 months ago

        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.

          • bitcrafter ( bitcrafter@programming.dev ) 
            7·
            9 months ago

            The theoretical concern is that some nefarious company will start making improvements and not contribute them back so that it can have access to (and possibly even sell) its own premium version that takes advantage of the hard work of the community without giving back.

            Personally, I am a bit skeptical of this for a couple of reasons. First, I have a really hard time seeing any company care enough about uutils to do this. Second, continually merging changes from an upstream project is a real pain, so there is a strong incentive to make contributions back out of self-interest.

            But even to the extent that there is some grounds to be concerned, it is not enough for so many people to contribute so much noise to every single one of these posts whining, as if it is attack on them personally.

          • Scafir ( Scafir@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
            13·
            9 months ago

            It’s not a matter of “him” personally. Permissive license allow for a work to be taken and redistributed by other entities, without enforcing them to release their changes. This creates a one way relationship that is generally detrimental to the open source ecosystem, allowing work to be stolen away from the public. That being said, choosing a license is situational, and a permissive one can be a great choice in certain instances. For that particular case, I don’t see much benefit to having a permissive licence.

          • OfCourseNot ( OfCourseNot@fedia.io ) 
            5·
            9 months ago

            Not the commenter you’re asking, but I do consider the MIT licence a bad one for something like a core part of an OS. Not all FOSS licences are created equal, there’re even important differences between the different GPLs (GPL2 is more permissive than GPL3, for example. With AGPL you have to grant the freedoms to the users even if the software is running out of your server, which isn’t a thing with GPL2/3), and even the most permissive ones have a reason to exist, but I’m yet to hear (or read) a good one for these uutils, so I’m not touching any distro or project that uses these mit core utils with a ten foot pole.

            • bitcrafter ( bitcrafter@programming.dev ) 
              2·
              9 months ago

              What specific problem are you afraid would make your life worse as a result of uutils being MIT-licensed that is so bad that the entire operating system is verbatim to you? Especially given that coreutils will continue to be available to you?

  • Avid Amoeba ( avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ) 
    31·
    9 months ago

    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.

      • Pommes_für_dein_Balg ( mech@feddit.org ) 
        15·
        9 months ago

        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.

        • Avid Amoeba ( avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ) 
          6·
          9 months ago

          We’ve played this game with browser engines and we find ourselves in a world with no viable community-controlled browser.

          Read a thread on rust forum about this and my impression is that most folks fall in two ideological categories. Either “No politic here” or some form of libertarianism. I understand where both come from as I’ve gone through some form of either, and I think both are transitional for many people. I used to roll my eyes hard at people making license arguments. We’re past the point where tech corporations were playing nice with people. As they keep shitting on products and take more and more of people’s work without returning anything, more and more people from those two camps would come to the realization that everything is political and the social infrastructure of open source - the infrastructure that gets more people to do labour for a project - is what creates and keeps open source alive over the long haul. The excitement that a new language or framewwok creates is fleeting. The GPL-MIT/BSD/Apache/etc divide isn’t so much one of exact guarantees and legal rights, it is some of that, but more importantly it’s a political statement of intent.

          • bitcrafter ( bitcrafter@programming.dev ) 
            3·
            9 months ago

            We’ve played this game with browser engines and we find ourselves in a world with no viable community-controlled browser.

            Where would you say Firefox fits into this? (This question is not a gotchya; I am genuinely having trouble seeing whether it is a valid counter-example or not.)

            • Avid Amoeba ( avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ) 
              3·
              9 months ago

              The way I see (Mozilla) Firefox is a project whose devekopment is funded by its competitor - (Google/Alphabet) Chrome - so that there’s plausible deniability against anti-trust enforcement, the kinds of which Microsoft was subjected to some decades ago. I don’t think it’s a self-sustaining community project like say Debian is. Still use it over Chromium. Funnily, Chromium is a descendent of an organic community project - KHTML - that got extended and eventually taken over by our friendly familiar corporations.

        • bitcrafter ( bitcrafter@programming.dev ) 
          4·
          9 months ago

          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.

        • Limerance ( Limerance@piefed.social ) English
          2·
          9 months ago

          FreeBSD and the other BSDs are doing pretty well with permissive licensing. They have done a lot of important work that also ended up in Linux.

          What sometimes happens is their code is forked, and then published under GPL. Meaning the original project isn’t given back to.

      • tangonov ( tangonov@lemmy.ca ) 
        7·
        9 months ago

        It’s not about any of us enjoying the license*, it’s about preserving the integrity of free software. It’s both flattering and disturbing that core utils is popular enough that people have decided to give them away to anyone who would want to take them without ever contributing back. If those people are found out there will be no legal recourse. Those Rust rewrites would inevitably be made proprietary without any credit for the authors.

        • bitcrafter ( bitcrafter@programming.dev ) 
          4·
          9 months ago

          First GNU coreutils is going to remain GPL-licensed, so nothing that already exists is being given away; the only thing that is happening is that some people have decided to write brand new code. (And it is worth noting that GPL only says that if you share the binaries, you have to share the source code; if your changes are only used internally, you do not have to contribute them back, though you probably want to do so since it makes your life easier down the road when you want to use newer version of upstream.)

          Second, what scenario exactly is it that you are worried about? I want a specific and plausible answer, not just vague allusions.

          Finally, if the Rust authors are fine with the possibility that someone will use their code in this way, then who are we to tell them to stop their development when we can continue to use GNU coreutils?

          You did not answer my question, and I think it is an important one so I will repeat it: should they abandon the project if they are unwilling to use your preferred license?

          • tangonov ( tangonov@lemmy.ca ) 
            4·
            9 months ago

            I wrote this before I realized that you don’t actually care about the answer, you just want people to shut up about it, so sorry. If you want somebody to do the work you’ll have to do it yourself now. You’ve been given plenty of examples in this thread already

            • bitcrafter ( bitcrafter@programming.dev ) 
              4·
              9 months ago

              I have not been given a specific example of a scenario involving uutils, I have only been told about scenarios for unrelated and very different projects, and the difference between the situations is significant enough that you can’t simply point to them and declare that your point has automatically been proven. In fact, I would argue that uutils is such a different case that it is implausible that such a scenario could occur and become a big problem.

              And yes, people stopping complaining about work being done on a project they are not involved with in every single post discussing it would be a perfectly fine outcome for me. But if they are not going to do that, then I would also be happy with getting my questions answered because I believe that they are relevant.

              • tangonov ( tangonov@lemmy.ca ) 
                4·
                9 months ago

                I think the biggest point you may be missing here is if you start re-writing GNU/Linux (which is what uutils is the first step in doing) with an MIT license, you start making reasons for commercial entities that contribute back out of obligation to stop supporting upstream free software. This is a no brainer to me. As to whether or not anybody should stop writing uutils, the answer is **obviously not. ** The license, however, is free game for scrutiny

                • bitcrafter ( bitcrafter@programming.dev ) 
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  Okay, but is this group trying to re-write all of the GPL software in the Linux ecosystem with an MIT license? I ask this because I think that the words “first step” are doing a lot of the lifting in your argument.

                  And just to be clear, my objection is not to people disagreeing with the license; in fact, as I have said elsewhere–though I hardly expect you to have read all of my comments here!–I think that the underlying criticism is actually reasonable, I just also think that the extent of the concern is exaggerated in practice in this specific case (which is why I keep trying to pin people down on specifics rather than generalities). Again, my objection is that people feel the need to post the same inane comments with varying degree of toxicity (such referring to them as using a “cuck” license) complaining about it in every single post.

      • Alavi ( somegeek@programming.dev ) 
        4·
        9 months ago

        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.

          • Alavi ( somegeek@programming.dev ) 
            3·
            9 months ago

            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.

            • onlinepersona ( onlinepersona@programming.dev ) 
              1·
              9 months ago

              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.

              • Alavi ( somegeek@programming.dev ) 
                1·
                9 months ago

                The compatibility stuff really do need understanding.

                You can’t use all other projects in your GPL project and your GPL project cant be used within every project.

                permissive licenses really do have no compatibility since they forbid nothing and allow everything (which isnt good most of the time) so tgey are simpler to use.

              • tux0r ( tux0r@snac.rosaelefanten.org ) 
                1·
                8 months ago

                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.

  • mesa ( mesamunefire@piefed.social ) English
    16·
    9 months ago

    It is trolling when it broke production level systems?

    To be fair im NOT blaming the rust util team. I hope the best for them. But it was a bad decision to use something like that to power systems before it was fully tested and ready. It broke many different things in prod at work and we had to switch over to another distro entirely. Which was a lot of work. It made us stop using Ubuntu which is a shame.