Introduction Following on from Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu, Ubuntu will be the first major Linux distribution to adopt sudo-rs as the default implementation of sudo, in partnership with the Trifecta Tech Foundation The change will be effective from the release of Ubuntu 25.10. You can see the Trifecta Tech Foundation’s announcement here. What is sudo-rs? sudo-rs is a reimplementation of the traditional sudo tool, written in Rust. It’s being developed by the Trifecta Tech Founda...
Granted, sudo isn’t in coreutils, but it’s sufficiently standard that I’d argue that the licence is very relevant to the wider Linux community.
Anyway, I answered this at length the last time this subject came up here, but the TL;DR is that private companies (like Canonical, who owns Ubuntu) love the MIT license because it allows them to take the code and make proprietary versions of it without having to release the source code. Consider the implications of a
sudobinary that’s Built For Ubuntu™ with closed-source proprietary hooks into Canonical’s cloud auth provider. It’s death by a thousand MIT-licensed cuts to our once Free operating system.Very useful concrete example of how these changes might be a problem. Thanks.
What’s the problem with it? These MIT programs already exists. Anyone can make proprietary version. Including in Ubuntu doesn’t change that.
Also your example is pointless. Canonical would rather make a proprietary pam module instead of a custom internal fork of sudo-rs.