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Rust Coreutils Continues Working Toward 100% GNU Compatibility, Proving Trolls Wrong
(www.phoronix.com)
Lol, very first pair of comments. I love phoronix sometimes.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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Ah, the duality of man...
Volta raging over any rust post, a classic XD
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.
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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 corporations to take without giving back.
It's why Sony and Apple based their operating systems on BSD over Linux.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 :)
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Going from GPL to a weaker license was a terrible idea and whoever supported it should be held accountable.
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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.
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Lol, phoronix being on point
Rust Coreutils Continues Working Toward 100% GNU Compatibility, Proving Trolls Wrong
98 comments
Phoronix, you are the trolls.
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