The uutils project announced tonight the release of Rust Coreutils 0.3, another step forward for this Rust version alternative to GNU Coreutils that has been attracting a lot of interest lately due to Ubuntu 25.10 now using it by default.
Rust Coreutils 0.3 brings improved GNU test suite compatibility with now passing 532 tests, or nearly an 84% pass rate. There is improved error handling and other updates to better match the behavior of GNU Coreutils… Such as the recently noted date issue breaking Ubuntu 25.10’s unattended upgrades.
Every time this comes up, I see people complaining about the license, and I have an urge every time to start a project anew, or to find yet another project which re-writes coreutils in Rust but licensed with GPLv3.
Today I finally gathered enough urge to… do a search in Kagi. No. There is no such project.
Shall we start one? Even with just a stub it’ll be a start. Anyone?
Well, MIT projects can be forked into a new GPLv3 project, right? If Canonical cared, they could have done that to assuage this concern.
I think it’s a valid concern. Pushover licenses are bad. But even if a GPL Rust coreutils project exists (I actually have one, but I don’t have the same goals), it seems unlikely that Canonical would be bothered to pivot to it.