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
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.
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.
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.