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Rust Coreutils Continues Working Toward 100% GNU Compatibility, Proving Trolls Wrong
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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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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 we are users, contributors, packagers, distributors... and if the project is unsustainable and suddenly becomes proprietary that is bad.
Or if the project is included in proprietary systems. Nobody will have the right to get source code then, or in case of GPLv3 even the right to install other software.
Copyleft and GPLv3 grant users the rights to prevent e-waste or replace shitty proprietary software on useful hardware with better one.
Copyleft licenses spread these rights, while permissive ones do nothing apart from handing out software for nothing in return.
So, in your opinion, should these developers simply stop their work on this project of they are not willing to use the GPL?
No, but as they do great work it is a shame that they dont protect it and thereby reduce the protection of every distro shipping them
Fair enough. I do actually get the concern, though I think that the threat is being exaggerated. However, I would argue that, if the goal is not to try and get these developers to abandon their efforts, then it does not make sense for every single discussion to get flooded with the same complaints about the license to the point that not much else seems to get talked about.
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?
You mean, why am I participating in the discussion of project that I enjoy following?