Linux

As I recall Ubuntu will allow to switch uutils to coreutils. So it looks like Linux Mint will continue to use coreutils

Likely not anytime soon as they tend to hold off latest features and prefer older (but maintained) LTS versions of just about everything. Also especially not if it turns out to be a bad idea; they explicitly build Mint without Snaps since their inclusion in the Ubuntu base.

The time has come to GNU-slash the enemies of freedom!

This is one of the old-time original arguments in the OSS community.

The crux of the matter is that the GNU licenses require that modifications be released back to the community. Other "more permissible" licenses like MIT do not.

So if you want to make a commercial version of X, and X is under a GPL, then any changes you make need to be released under the GPL. The idea being "I shared this code with the community with the intent that you can use it for free and modify it as you like, but you need to share back what you do." Also called "Share and share alike".

This defends against "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics that companies like Microsoft has loved to do. They can't take your code, modify it for their own purposes and re-sell it possibly making a more popular version that is now proprietary.

I fear moving away from GPL that moving to Rust seems to bring, but Rust does fix real memory issues.

Take the recent rsync vulnerabilities for example.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/linux-news/cve-2024-12084-rsyn-security-urgent-update-needed-on-unix-bsd-systems/#more-2215

At least this one in a Rust implementation of rsync would have very likely been avoided:

CVE-2024-12085 – A flaw was found in the rsync daemon which could be triggered when rsync compares file checksums. This flaw allows an attacker to manipulate the checksum length (s2length) to cause a comparison between a checksum and uninitialized memory and leak one byte of uninitialized stack data at a time. Info Leak via uninitialized Stack contents defeats ASLR.

Mainly memory safety; split (which is also used for other programs like sort) had a memory heap overflow issue last year to name one. The GNU Coreutils are well tested and very well written, the entire suite of programs has a CVE only once every few years from what I can see, but they do exist and most of those would be solved with a memory and type safe language.

That said, Rust also handles parallelism and concurrency much better than C ever could, though most of these programs don't really benefit from that or not much since they already handled this quite well, especially for C programs.

See other comments: all these rewrites are not using the GPL but rather permissive licenses like MIT. Bye-bye FOSS (in those ecosystems).

uutils/Linux?

Kinda like a full 180° back to UNIX™.

I would love this news if it didn't move away from the GPL.

Mass move to MIT is just empowering enshittification by greedy companies.