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
More people would inclined to contribute or include it in there own projects if it wasn’t a regression in terms of FOSS.
I.e. why contribute to this project that could be forked to create tools that don’t respect the users when the main existing project doesn’t have that flaw?
Given that the Rust community seems to prefer more permissive licenses, I doubt that there many people who would be interested in contributing that be put off by this in practice.
Unless you are telling me that you personally had been really motivated to contribute to this project yourself, but changed your mind when your leaned about the license?
I personally yes. Also I’ve seen hesitation in including them in distros because of it
Fair enough, but in that case, them using a less optimal license is a problem that will solve itself because it won’t be used, so it is not something that needs to be brought up by multiple people in every post on uutils.