From theregister.comEfforts are afoot to replace the GNU coreutils with Rust ones in the version after next of Ubuntu, 25.10 – which also means changing the software license.
The next version of Ubuntu, 25.04 "Plucky Puffin," isn't here yet – but a significant change is taking shape for the release after that, which will be 25.10. That is when Canonical and friends will replace the current core utilities – from the GNU project and implemented in C – with the newer uutils suite, which is written in Rust.
A discussion of the change is underway on Ubuntu's Discourse forum, although the thread is currently in slow mode to prevent it turning into a flamewar. The coreutils are, as their name suggests, a core part of any Unix-like OS. They provide many of the essential commands that make a Unix-like OS ... well, like Unix. They are one of the important elements of a Unix-like system that, combined with the Linux kernel itself, turn it into a usable operating system. They are an important element of the "GNU" in "GNU/Linux." Saying that, anyone who mainly drives their computer from a graphical desktop may never directly see them.
The uutils is MIT licensed, not GPL.
