Rust Coreutils 0.5 is now available as the latest milestone for this Rust-based alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.5 continues moving closer to “full GNU compatibility” with nearly a 90% pass rate on the GNU test suite.
Rust Coreutils 0.5 is described in today’s announcement as “a significant milestone featuring comprehensive platform improvements” There are an additional 22 tests passing now that brings Rust Coreutils 0.5 up to an 87.75% pass rate for the GNU test suite.
Rust haters are just a hilarious species. It’s like they are paid Russian trolls blowing everything out of proportion, making nonsensical arguments, and always whining about one thing or another.
I can’t tell if these are real people or just bot and sock puppet accounts operated by suckless.
Rust is fine, but rewriting GPL software under a weaker license is not.
What I don’t like with Rust coreutils is the MIT license instead of GPL.
Yeah, the usual argument for not picking GPL with Rust is based on how it applies to static linking, which is how Rust works by default. But the coreutils are executables, not libraries.
Even for the libraries I think it’d be nice with some stronger guarantees. Allegedly the EUPL is copyleft but allows static linking, so probably something to look into.
Ah well. At least it’s also possible for orgs like GNU to re-release forks of MIT stuff as GPL. The MIT licensing doesn’t only work for the proprietary-preferring orgs.
Are you a (potential) contributor?
I don’t think it matters.
They are certainly a member of the community.
Choosing MIT over GPL is a political decision that empowers corporations at the expense of the community.
Yah companies can (and sometimes do) choose to give back to the community with MIT projects.
GPL/AGPL/LGPL/MPL 2.0 ensure that they do give back when they take.
I just don’t trust companies enough to use MIT.
They are certainly a member of the community.
There is no “community”. The GPL itself was explicitly created for the freedom(s) of the individual. The faux-“community” is just an attempt to create an “identity” in hopes of encouraging people to contribute, or at least advocate. And many projects don’t even like being advocated for outside of potential contributor pools (a few hate any level of advocacy outright).
Incidentally, liberally licensed software, on average, tend to value adoption at least as much as direct contribution, and thus would usually appreciate advocacy more.
is a political decision
Or a practical one, or …
Everything can be argued to have a political aspect to it. But what people (often non-contributors) have in mind ignores many relevant technical/practical aspects that may play a role.
that empowers corporations
Open-source license choice is practically near the bottom of an endless list of things that actually empower corporations. Most of the empowerment comes from the inherent nature of the system, which is something software licenses, GPL included, don’t even pretend to try to fix.
But that’s not why I asked.
Do you know how many liberally licensed essential packages are installed in your system right now, and can you name them? From my experience, most of the people who quibble about this don’t and can’t.
* Not that it matters, but I personally use AGPL or MPLv2 for my own stuff.
I think the compatibility concerns are legit at least in principle. That said, if you look at the issues, 8 of the test failures are exotic edge cases in ‘tail’. I for one am not hitting these utilities hard enough to run into that kind of thing. These utilities are already good enough for most of us.
I am a fan of the benefits of Rust. The fact that RedoxOS and Ubuntu are shipping the same Coreutils as we exit 2025 is amazing.