OfCourseNot

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.

As far as I know uutils has always been under an mit licence, hasn’t it?

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.