The Ubuntu Project has announced that a bug in the Rust-based uutils version of the date comman [...]

Ignoring the anti-GPL nature of Rust rewrites, it seems that it has been foolish to roll out rust-coreutils wholesale instead of perhaps an option to be selected while installing from the live image, which would almost certainly have lead to enthusiasts testing these utilities; and after enough data had been collected could then have been put in the main branch.

This bug report is old so it should have been fixed by now, but I wanted to commentate on rust-coreutils.

    • trompete [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      1 month ago

      This rewrite of coreutils is licensed under some non-copyleft license, whereas the GNU coreutils are obviously under GPL. Currently there are other Rust rewrite projects of various tools and libraries, and they all seem to be like that. There have long been folks who would rather get rid of GPL code, and various corporations are encouraging this. If at some point they succeed, they could make a fully proprietary userland and cause a very real setback to free software and user freedom.

    • lurkerlady [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      1 month ago

      rust itself is quite good, licensing is a separate matter. its pretty trivial to make very snappy and efficient programs in rust due to how memory is handled. its generally also more secure, because again, the memory management is superb.

      i love devving on rust its great. some orgs are ran by idiots that dont know much about licensing and dont do copyleft unfortunately