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
I think a part of it may be that they are from the younger generation like myself, and most of them don’t really know the history of software and FOSS, and MIT is just a safe option for them. I think they haven’t really put in the time to read and undertstand the philosophy and logic behind FOSS and read the licenses and writings.
But why MIT? How come that became the default? Why not GPL? Is Microslop Github suggesting MIT by default?
Now that you mention it, it is kinda strange. MIT has been abused before.
as well as Apache
I’m not sure but theres something in my mind bout MIT being the first suggested license for github.
and also, to be real, you need to do some reasearch and actually understand the GPL license if you want to use it for your project. But with MIT you can just slap it on there and forget. It’s convenient, but like a lot of conveniences, can be very bad.
Why do you need to do research for GPL? It’s the OG opensource license AFAIK that forces users to also opensource their stuff. MIT let’s anybody close source your code and make money with it.
GPL isn’t perfect as it doesn’t solve the funding problem, but MIT is about the worst thing one can do for opensource: do the work for companies, for free, and be OK with never contributing back to the opensource ecosystem.
The compatibility stuff really do need understanding.
You can’t use all other projects in your GPL project and your GPL project cant be used within every project.
permissive licenses really do have no compatibility since they forbid nothing and allow everything (which isnt good most of the time) so tgey are simpler to use.