1) This is a cool project and I wish them success. It would be really cool if these became the default utilities some day soon.
2) I think the MIT license was a mistake. These are often cloning GNU utilities, so referencing GNU source in its original language and then re-implementing it in Rust would be the obvious thing to do. But porting GPL-licensed code to an MIT licensed project is not allowed. Instead, the utilities must be re-implemented from scratch, which seems like a waste of effort. I would be interested in doing the work of porting GNU source to Rust, but I'm not interested in re-writing them all from scratch, so I haven't contributed to this project.
"Seems like a waste of effort" in a vacuum yes, but
1 - GNU utilities is ancient crufty #IFDEF'd C that's been in maintenance mode for decades. You want code to handle quirks of Tru64 and Ultrix? You got it.
2 - Waving your hands around 'the community will take care of it' is magical thinking. C developers don't grow on trees. C tooling is kinda weird and doesn't resemble anything modern - good luck finding enough VOLUNTEER C developers to make your goals happen.
2) I think the MIT license was a mistake. These are often cloning GNU utilities, so referencing GNU source in its original language and then re-implementing it in Rust would be the obvious thing to do. But porting GPL-licensed code to an MIT licensed project is not allowed. Instead, the utilities must be re-implemented from scratch, which seems like a waste of effort. I would be interested in doing the work of porting GNU source to Rust, but I'm not interested in re-writing them all from scratch, so I haven't contributed to this project.