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Microsoft ships Ubuntu through WSL
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Canonical is rewriting Ubuntu in Rust
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Neither Canonical nor Rust are shy of permissive (re) licensing.
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???
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Profit
They haven't got rust-utils or rust Sudo working yet.
coreutils ships with Ubunutu 26.04, albeit with a number of caveats.
Package: rust-coreutils
Version: 0.8.0-0ubuntu3
Priority: required
Section: utils
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Debian Rust Maintainers <pkg-rust-maintainers@alioth-lists.debian.net>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 16.0 MB
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.43), libgcc-s1 (>= 4.2), libselinux1 (>= 3.1~)
Conflicts: coreutils-from-uutils (<< 0.0.0~ubuntu22~)
Homepage: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils
Task: minimal
Download-Size: 4,235 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: no
APT-Sources: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu resolute/main amd64 Packages
Description: Universal coreutils utils, written in Rust
This packages replaces the GNU coreutils package written in C.
It should be a drop-in replacement but:
Some options have NOT been implemented,
Might have important bugs,
Might be slower,
Output of the binaries might be slightly different.
IMO this rust shit is just an attempt to convert a GPL licensed ecosystem into the Corpo-CHUD preferred MIT license.
Just like with Clang, the Corpo is simply intolerably offended by being asked to contribute back to the community.
If they're translating GPL code to Rust, doesn't that constitute a derived work and require the resulting code to be GPL licenced too?
Yeah, pretty sure rote translations of the same logic into a different language is considered a derivative work. This is why companies making their own version of copyrighted software often take a “clean room” approach to cover their asses where different people study the existing software and write the spec than the people implementing the spec.
Wow! What an observant smart thought.
Well, except for the fact that code conversion doesn't give you the permission to change licenses or remove copyright. And the small matter of fact that both projects mentioned are Canonical projects, where whatever code that is not directly copyrighted by Canonical, is contributed by someone who signed an agreement with this stipulation:
(b) To the maximum extent permitted by the relevant law, You grant to Us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, irrevocable licence under the Copyright covering the Contribution, with the right to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees, to reproduce, modify, display, perform and distribute the Contribution as part of the Material; provided that this license is conditioned upon compliance with Section 2.3.
"Us" being Canonical of course. So they could actually "re-license" the projects right now, without changing a single line of code.
It's always astonishing how condiment in their ignorance people are when it comes to these matters.
You geniuses are getting too predictable with your ignorance.
I literally wrote what's quoted above yesterday replying to someone else.
Using Rust in no way requires the usage of pushover licenses. While it's true that many devs are using pushover licenses, there are plenty of GPL Rust projects. You are just focusing on the sensationalized ones that get mentioned in news cycles.
- AGPL Rust projects on GitHub
- GPL Rust projects on GitHub
- Unfortunately, Codeberg doesn't support filtering by license, but there are Rust projects on Codeberg, some of which will use copyleft licenses here.
- GNOME's GitLab is also rife with GPL-licensed Rust projects.
It doesn't require, but they use rust as an excuse to do that. Ubuntu's attempts at rust rewrite was all license change iirc.
Which is exactly why you're free to license your code under GPL. If corpos can use, then so can you.
Wait waddup with clang? Any sources I could read up on?
Clang seems to mainly be maintained by Apple under the Apache license
It's the general opinion. Except if you're a stray liberal on lemmy.ml/c/Linux
Lemmy is written in Rust. I don't think dessalines is a stray liberal on lemmy.ml lol
You're missing the key part of the argument: relicensing.
Converting a GPL codebase to another language creates a derivative work which, by the terms of the GPL, must be GPL-licensed.
Which speaks to my other comment: nothing about Rust necessitates using corpo licenses. The reason so many things are being rewritten in Rust is that it's a great language and it provides tangible benefits to users. The owning class doesn't need a special language as a pretext to de-GPL an ecosystem. They could do it with C, OCAML, or any other lang.
The language, as an inanimate object, doesn't have an ideology, sure. However, people running the show in partnership with the ruling class have.
IMO any speech about Rust rewritings must denounce how the language can be, and it is, being used to attack software freedom.
IMO it isn’t in bad faith any speech making that apparent.
I'm not sure I understand what you meant (there may be a typo in there).
The language, as an inanimate object, doesn’t have an ideology, sure. However, people running the show in partnership with the ruling class have.
This, I agree with. It is very concerning that Rust has so much corporate buy-in. And the structure of The Rust Foundation being operated more like a business than something like the Zig Software Foundation does worry me.
But I often feel the need to chime-in and correct the common misconception that Rust rewrite == corpo-relicense. It's false and I think the conspiratorial coupling of Rust to corporate embrace-extend-extinguish only serves to discourage people from writing better software.
I would love to see a community fork of Rust and its ecosystem one day, but I don't think we get there by discouraging people from writing or using Rust software.
This is a bit of a tangent, so I didn't include it in the above comment, but I don't think "open source" is sufficiently anti-capitalist, so the (A)GPL was never going to save us to begin with. "Open source", as defined by the OSI (a.k.a. a handful of megacorps in a trench coat) and the FSF, prevent "discrimination of use". So if you want your software to be "open source" or "free software", you have to accept that your software can be used by for-profit entities to exploit your labor, and potentially to perform heinous acts, such as military or surveillance usage. What we currently call "copyleft" is actually just copylib 😭
No open source license, not even the (A)GPL, allows you to forbid this. Unfortunately, I don't see an alternative framework being widely adopted anytime soon. It seems that the best you can do for now is use niche licenses like this and just accept that your software can't be considered "open source" :/
there's gccrs
My understanding of gccrs is that it merely provides a way to compile Rust software with GCC instead of LLVM, which is great! But it's such a small piece of the Rust ecosystem (it's merely a frontend). Maybe it'd be a good starting point for a more copyleft ecosystem in the future though.
I always feel like the much bigger challenge is whether anyone can still maintain the codebase afterwards. You throw away so much institutional knowledge by doing a conversion like this...
You don't just convert and sleep though. You convert and prune. You slowly rework parts post-conversion to use more sensible approaches/libraries. It's not a one-and-done operation, it's an ongoing thing that they judge the cost of investing in now is less than the long term maintaining C Ubuntu.
Well the issue is the chosen person is going to be automating the process, not doing it by hand, so there is no refactoring going on.
Look at the folks in college right now, no one can or will.
I don't get why the rust cult mist always convert something from C to rust. Why not just make new software in rust and leave the stuff that works alone?
Because that would require competence.
It isn’t always about “new”. For example, some GNU binaries are decades old and were changed only to fix bugs.
C has major disadvantages compared to Rust, which is why even Linus Torvalds said a couple of years ago, to not write any new C code anymore for the Kernel and that old code will be transpiled steadily.
It is not about a cult. It is not about being fancy. It is quite the opposite. Choosing Rust over C is very rational.
Also, obligatory fuck Canonical. Automatic transpiling is such a stupid thing. Have fun maintaining the new code that was written by a machine, while not having any Rust experts in your team.
Because of the users that don’t want to change how they work. But still would like not to be owned by the onslaught of LLM wielding hackers
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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