Hello all!
Firstly, thank you all for your comments. I appreciate the engagement on this topic! I’d like to address the topic of licences with my perspective.
In my opinion, moving a package from an implementation that is GPL to an implementation that is MIT licensed does not pose a threat to Ubuntu, or our community and I hope to explain why I hold that opinion in this post.
As I mentioned in a previous reply, this move should not be seen as indicative of a political agenda, or of a wider move away from GNU software as a point of principle - this change is motivated by a desire to evolve core technical components of Ubuntu in a way that makes them as resilient and maintainable as possible over time - hopefully attracting new contributors to our already vibrant community.
I recognise the pivotal role that the GPL has played in the evolution of open source - in fact most of Canonical’s own software is, and will continue to be, GPL licensed for all of the reasons presented above in the various replies to this post.
Ubuntu is a collection of software that we curate to build a distribution. It’s a project dedicated to shipping the latest, and best open source we can find. There is no evidence of foul play, bad practice or poor intentions from the uutils maintainers - they’re a thoughtful, dedicated community who are building their own software, and even contributing back to GNU coreutils in some cases. They are achieving things I think we should aspire to with Ubuntu in the coming years, and I remain committed to giving this a chance at success - noting that we and others will need to work closely with them to resolve issues with locales, selinux support and other issues.
If the current situation changes and we believe that the interests of the uutils project are no longer aligned with those of Ubuntu, we can change the coreutils package we choose to ship with Ubuntu.
Likewise, if during the 25.10 cycle, we identify significant incompatibilities that detract from the stability and overall experience people have come to expect from Ubuntu, and we believe they cannot be solved in time for 26.04 LTS, then we will of course reconsider.
In the mean time, GNU coreutils will remain available, fully maintained in the Ubuntu archive for those who wish to use the existing package.
I hope this addresses some of the concerns raised. And I’d love to hear if anyone has had a play with oxidizr, and what their experience has been!
Jon