Sylvestre Ledru who serves as the lead developer of the uutils project for the Rust Coreutils implementation presented at FOSDEM 2026 this weekend on this initiative. Ledru has spoken at FOSDEM in prior years on Rust Coreutils and this year’s talk focused primarily on Ubuntu 25.10’s adoption of it in place of GNU Coreutils.
Ledru’s presentation covered the progress made on Rust Coreutils in recent times and Ubuntu 25.10’s uptake of Rust Coreutils and continuing that for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. While some bugs have been found as a result of it, they have been fixed rather quickly. Ledru’s presentation also points out some of the popular trolling around Rust Coreutils and ultimately how many of those commenters have been proven wrong
No they can’t, at least not legally. Part of using GPL software is that you need to include the GPL with any changes you make.
It’s the entire point of the license and the concept behind copyleft.
Reread that quote, and you will see that I was saying that just because they are required to distribute the source code with binaries–which they are only required to do if they distribute binaries–does not mean that they have to take any steps to contribute the changes they’ve made to the upstream project.