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
Wr like the Rust, we hate the cuck license. Simple.
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.
it still has a permissive license :(
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.
I wasn’t aware that the coreutils software was changing its license?
As far as I know uutils has always been under an mit licence, hasn’t it?
In your comment you said:
it’s absolutely awful for the coreutils
My (admittedly, facetiously made) point is that coreutils is already GPL, and it’s not like it is going away.
What’s wrong with a permissive licence?
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.
It allows uuitls, which is an important piece of closed source software, to be used in properitary software. and that is bad.
Isn’t it open source? Why is it being in proprietary software bad?
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.
If you expect that people will in reality treat the project as if it is copyleft. Why not support it being officially copyleft? Why just trust corporations to be good citizens when you could insist on it?
This. Licenses are so that trust is not needed and being a good FOSS citizen is expected. That means publishing your code if you fork, giving proper attibution and granting your users the same rights as the original project did.
Something very normal.
Agreed!
Okay, but if the developers of uutils do not care about these things, and they would be the ones most hurt because they would not get access to the changes that others are making… why should the rest of us make a big deal over it?
Because it is not my decision as it is not my project, and I do not like to constantly be making big deal about other people’s decisions unless there is a significant chance of them having a significantly negative impact on my life, which I do not see in this case.
Then why are you in this thread at all?
What freedom is being taken away from you, personally, exactly, that makes it so bad that they decided to go with this license?
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.
Okay, so it sounds like in practice this would primarily affect the uutils developers by denying them access to these changes. However, they are the ones who deliberately chose this license, so why make a big deal of it in every single uutils thread?
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.
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?
Are you going to complain about this every time uutils is posted?
Yes, because its a valid complain.
Okay, then every time you complain about it I will point out that your complaint is a petty one that adds nothing to the discussion.
It will be a tireless job but someone has to do it. :-)
I guess that’s fair.
Yes.
Because I can.
And also, as the other two commenters said, it’s a valid complaint for something as important as coreutils.Just because you can add noise to a discussion does not mean that you have to.
Licencing is a legitimate concern (not noise), even more so considering it’s for the core utils
So it needs to be commented on in every single article?
If so, is that going to change anything?
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:
-
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
-
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.
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.
-
It does not mean i can’t.
And that’s all i care.You’re right, you can contribute as much noise as you can to any discussion you want.
But that is all you are doing.
Lol, very first pair of comments. I love phoronix sometimes.
Ah, the duality of man…
Volta raging over any rust post, a classic XD
If they could just use a real licence and even more copyleft (at least something, like EUPL, MPL or GPLv2)
The licence would be significantly better. And would drive a bit more adoption.
So you are saying that the quality of the code and the functionality that it offers would be significantly improved?
(It’s not clear how much more adoption there would be, though a bit more is plausible.)
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 dont understand.
You are the one saying that the project would be significantly better. I am asking you to translate that significant claim into a set of metrics.
I really appreciate your insightful point as no one else has ever pointed this out before.
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.
Your first mistake was using Ubuntu on a production server. Canonical has made more than enough questionable decisions over the past decade that using Ubuntu for a production system should be a red flag.
Your probably right. It was an old setup but ill own it. I inherited it (mitus touch) so I probably should have put more effort into switching.
Switching can be hard sonetimes. At work we still have a few Ubuntu 20.04 LTS machines that need to be replaced.
It is trolling when it broke production level systems?
Depends. Were they the ones who put it into production level systems? If the answer to that question is no, then, well, you have your answer already.
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2025/10/ubuntu-announced-fix-2510-updates/
This specifically broke things at work and is why we moved off.
Right, so the answer to your question is that it is trolling the uutils devs because Ubuntu was the one that decided to make the switch.
i mean, how many realistically? how many systems are out there using non-LTS releases that would actually run into these edge cases? and auto-updating them in production without triggering the bug first? or maybe i’m a naive corpo
Honestly it was a bunch of docker containers that failed all around the same time. Kinda sucks. Again I blame more Ubuntu support (since we pay for it) than rust or rust utils.I hope to eventually switch all systems to using the library when they hit 100%. Its going to be so fast :)
What broke? If it was a GNU ism that wouldn’t work on *BSD either, than it is your own stupid fault. There are other linux distros that also don’t use the gnu core utils that would break things do.
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2025/10/ubuntu-announced-fix-2510-updates/
Sudo-rs broke things at work.
sudo-rs is a different project than uutils
Lol, phoronix forums being on point
So it still doesn’t work and there’s no timeline for when it will.
Got it.
That tends to be true of a lot of projects before they are finished.
