Oboi here we go 🙄
Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack. The last three holdouts, cp, mv and rm, have moved to uutils’ coreutils; the Rust reimplementation Canonical has been feeding into the distro since 2025.
They had been held back from 26.04 LTS over flaws in the uutils versions. Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases.
This change, while big, sits hidden away in an obscure mention in Canonical’s work-in-progress release notes for Ubuntu 26.10.
It’s been a long road
Canonical started oxidising Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship coreutils as the default. That release also made sudo-rs the default privilege tool, replacing a command that had been in place for decades.
26.04 was the release where the plan did slow down quite a bit, as Canonical kept cp, mv, and rm on their GNU versions due to a bunch of TOCTOU issues that were blocking the full implementation.
These were caught during an audit, when Canonical commissioned Zellic for two rounds between December 2025 and March 2026, focusing on the most security-sensitive utilities first.
Across both rounds, Zellic raised 113 issues, and 44 of them were assigned CVEs. Canonical says the vast majority have been resolved.
Getting here has had its ups and downs, and the last stretch was not clean. In July, uutils cp went back into the archive and came straight out again after it broke live image builds.
The fix was quick; as the developers marked it “Critical,” the fix went upstream, and the migration landed in time for 26.10. What changes for you?
When typing commands, nothing changes for you on the surface. uutils coreutils is designed to be a drop-in replacement for essential GNU tools, and the project treats any divergence from GNU as a bug, further pointing out that some options may still be missing or behave differently.
So if you prefer staying on the GNU version, you have the option to install the coreutils-from-gnu package that houses all the required components.
The next stage
Coreutils is one piece of a broader campaign. Earlier this year, Canonical became a Gold Sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation, pitching in €40,000 a year to fund memory-safe system software.
Under this, their current target is ntpd-rs, a Rust rewrite of the tools Ubuntu uses to keep its clock in sync. While work is still ongoing, it has already arrived for testing.
Its transition to being default is targeted for Ubuntu 27.04.
What Canonical is gradually building up towards is the completion of their oxidation vision for Ubuntu, and it’s not about blindly including new components. Rather, it looks like a measured approach that’s being worked out a few steps at a time.
As a developer I love rust but canonical can fuck all the way off with this shameless license laundering.
I really don’t see what they would gain by license laundering… They’ll unGPL Debian, Gnome, Wayland and the Linux Kernal next?
If you wanted something out of copyleft, you would have an easier time just building on top of FreeBSD. It does like ~80% of what Ubuntu does already.
I don’t feel too hot about them using MIT either, but I fail to see why they would implement this just to get rid of a GPL component. Seems expensive for nothing.
Yea know that is a fair point. I guess I struggle to see any other reason to support this? Even though I believe rust is nominally more secure it’ll be a decade before any core utils clone will be as hardened as the original just by virtue of the original having decades of bug finding and fixes done already.
I don’t think canonical would go through the effort under normal circumstances but I think they’re just taking the opportunity in front of them to ride the rust hype into a less copyleft ecosystem.
This actually ties into a broader complaint I have that the rust ecosystem is built around MIT due to influence of the corporate backers of the rust foundation. Which is unfortunate because I actually really love rust as a language.
My bet is, Canonical as a service provider has a customer that is willing to pay for access to more secure rust utils. Or they want to save resources fixing CVEs.
There’s also the spectre of future security regulations possibly demanding these changes one day too.
I still think its built on someone else’s money. lol
Ubuntu did invest in a security audit of uutils. It revealed issues that show fundamental misunderstandings on how to use posix APIs. If they cared about security they would have postponed the adoption at least one more cycle. Uutils are they not ready for general availability.
Plus after decades of bug fixing coreutils doesn’t have lots of security issues.
The VP of engineering of canonical keynoted Rust conf about uutils and is pushing forward the project. My guess is for political capital inside canonical.
Will long term uutils or another coreutils written in Rust will be a great improvement. Today is not the day.
As an example look at that https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/10011
Even calling it a race is a looking at the issue wrong. They are creating the file with more permissions that necessary and restricting later instead of the other way around.
There was another issue with chroot that had the same fundamental mistake.
But they created the file with too many permissions in a memory safe way.
This is so important!
Hmm you could very well be right. I guess I’m being to reasonable by knowing new rust code is not automatically (and not usually) more secure then old c battle tested c code. Shareholders and CEOs don’t understand that, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s been convinced rust is axiomatically more secure and bankrolling the migration over it
The otherside is just because code is old doesn’t mean its battle tested and doesn’t have bugs.
I think that aligns with the deployment strategy right? They are targeting 27 which is the middle release and not LTS. Get some mileage on it prior to 28 LTS.
But yeah, its all corpo speech when they talk about it. Its probably some executive decision of the likes of “We think Rust is axiomatically better, so let’s implement it” like you said.
How is this license laundering? These are complete new implementations and the original projects are not touched.
Because Canonicals real goal is to move Ubuntu entirely to corporate friendly licensing under the pretense of migrating to rust. Obviously they leave the original untouched, it’s a matter of adoption. Without the oxidization argument nobody would have gone along with Ubuntu just deciding to do a clean room implementation of gnu tools in corporate friendly licensing, by making it about oxidation they are able to manipulate a large portion of the rust community into contributing/supporting their license laundering.
If you are right, they started from the wrong place. I am pretty sure that in a corporate environment there are thing more important to be “corporate friendly” than the coreutils.
It’s not even Ubuntu doing the new implementation. And no, having a new project that is compatible to an existing one does not make it a license laundering. The word “license laundering” doesn’t even make sense.
Uh call it whatever you want but canonical pouring money and resources into development of corporate friendly licensed clones to existing tools so they can avoid copyleft restrictions in the future is not good. I never understand when people feel the need to defend corporations obviously harmful behavior.
This is not about defending corporations. It doesn’t matter who does that, I don’t think writing new tools with a different license is bad. My opinion has nothing to do about who does that, if communities, or corporations. I think having tools in a different language than C, especially something like Rust, is a good thing. Anyone who writes Rust code can read, adapt and make changes to it.
And for licensing, GPL can be problematic in some cases that is not compatible with every license. Therefore having an alternative in MIT license is a good thing. Even if it ends up being in a proprietary program, its still better than not able to use the code. The old GPL code is still maintained independently.
I think I’d rather have it be rust AND copyleft, so the only projects that can use it are the ones that contribute back to society
MIT does not prevent from contributing back. Also GPL does not ensure it is contributing back. Besides thiefs and Ai companies, anyone can use GPL privately, modify the code and do whatever they want without contributing back, if not published openly.
Can you name me MIT licensed projects where it is a problem like you describe?
Xorg had several proprietary clones, and their software authors described how they chose MIT specifically to spite Richard Stallman who annoyed them, but with the benefit of hindsight they conceded that he had been right about the licenses. I saw this in a talk on YouTube somewhere.
I actually an agree an independent rust project would be really cool. If it was also GPL. I have yet to encounter any argument against GPL that doesn’t boil down to corpo boot licking.
You say “Even if it ends up being in a proprietary program, it’s better than not being able to use the code”. This is a bad faith argument. Everyone can use GPL code freely, the restriction is only that you must also publish under GPL if you publish. I’m sorry your favorite corporation can’t profit off community projects without giving back to that community… not. If GPL was a real problem BSD would have overtaken Linux ages ago. But it didn’t because GPL is good not just for the community but for the project. The only people that don’t stand to gain from GPL are corporations that want to monopolize the technology.
One example is that GPL games cannot be published in Steam, with using Steams proprietary tools and features.
And in general I am not actually against for any company to use MIT licensed products without open sourcing their own proprietary tools. It would be nice if they open sourced it, but I am against in forcing companies to do so. Now I understand the risks involved here, but its not like MIT license is the devil, just like GPL can be problematic in some cases, MIT can too.
Pretty sure a GPL game can include non GPL parts, software doesn’t need to all be released under a single license for everything in the package. Look at CDDA, bunch of different licenses apply to parts of that and its on steam.
Corporations are by their nature entities with priorities that are not aligned to the good of society. It is natural and obvious that we do everything in our power to compel them to do the best thing for society rather than the best thing for them.
Also while valve tends to be a pretty fair company they don’t need to be proprietary. Their product is selling game licenses and server space for cloud sync, none of that requires a closed source client. So while valve may be my favorite corpo they don’t get a pass from my previous statement about not being sympathetic to wanting to profit of community projects without giving back.
The exact problem you point out is in my view a feature not a bug because it means there is an economic advantage to someone doing what steam does but open source. Which is exactly the sort of incentive that helps capitalism help people.