Literally why? Not even criticizing rust but the GNU core utils are easily some of the most reliable and documented software tools ever written.
Not to mention, looks like the rust core utils are MIT and not GPL.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Archlinux usually is a bit more reasonable. I don’t understand the forcing. Just makes me love it (archlinux) more!
I can finally stop calling it GNU/Linux.
Rust/linux^Rust^
Lust
Oh good God, Linux is finally old enough to start rusting?! And on BOTH ENDS?
vigorously shakes can of WD-40
Rust is good, rare Ubuntu W. Now stop with the forced use of snaps.
You think this is a win, but is just another step in the enshittification.
What about licences and FOSS?
According to the video it's MIT licence, and they discuss the risk of such a licence vs coreutils usage of the GPL
This worries me indeed.
Wait is this their way to break compatibility with old binaries so that you're forced to use snap?
They're steadily climbing the test suit:
The uutils should be compatible so I don't think so
Check out our new Coreutils! (Snap required)
Seriously though I'm just imagining that Coreutils are now going to be dependent on snap.
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That's extremely unexpected.
The GNU utils weren't written by Canonical so they were doomed from the start.
Not to worry, they'll ship 'em via snap.
More likely they will make them dependent on snap so you can't remove snap without breaking the system.
Oh god no
Why?
Because why? I can expect a very niche distro like Cachy do it but not a big project with a serious market share.
Canonical has a long history of doing wacky shit that nobody asked for though. Unity, upstart, snap, probably other things that I'm not thinking of
Unity at least didn't break anything, and you still had a choice in choosing desktop environment.
Unity was great, though. Ubuntu took a hit going back to customized gnome
Is there any actual benefit ?
Code written in Rust has been shown to have significantly fewer security vulnerabilities than code written in C. Distributions like Ubuntu ship a lot of security updates, so by switching to Rust-based utils, they can reduce their workload in the long run.
But looking at the security vulnerability records of gnu coreutils that wasn't really needed. There were like a handful in the last 15 years... So I don't really see a need or benefit here.
Ubuntu ship a lot of security updates
After introducing the Pro I don't think so.
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Well the rust project is MIT licensed, so definitely not.
I thought MIT licensing was a good thing?? What am i missing??
In large part it's a matter of opinions and different perspectives. A common consensus is libraries should be MIT and entire applications should be GPL. However, this is not held by all community members.
Overall, Rust is easier to read and harder to fuck up, so there's one argument in favour if it, in terms of community engagement. For an example of this, compare ls.c by Apple, GNU, FreeBSd and OpenBSD.
On the other hand, I should imagine most people simply install ripgrep and fd anyway.
The success of FOSS can in large part be attributed to copyleft licenses like the GPL. Without the protections of copyleft clauses, software just gets exploited by large corporations and end users are locked out. For just one example, if GNU software had used MIT, the entire free router movement (i.e ddwrt, openwrt and co.) would probably not exist today.
See: Free Software Foundation, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc..
Edit: actually, I think by the time of this specific lawsuit, the sources for wrt54g were already released after community pressure, this article details the history a bit better.
This is the Linux community's Sophie's choice.
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