uutils/coreutils is MIT-licensed and primarily hosted on GitHub (with issues and PRs there) whereas GNU coreutils is GPL-licensed and hosted on gnu.org (with mailing lists).
EDIT: I'm not expressing a personal opinion, just stating how things are. The license change may indeed be of interest to some companies.
The GPL protects the freedom of the users while MIT-licensed software can be easily rug-pulled or be co-opted by the big tech monopolists.
Using GitHub is unacceptable as it is banning many countries from using it. You are excluding devs around the world from contributing. Plus it is owned by Microsoft.
So we replaced a strong copyleft license and a solid decentralized workflow with a centralized repo that depends on the whims of Microsoft and the US government and that is somehow a good thing?
There is also another crowd that completely aligns with the US foreign policy and also has the same animosity towards those countrie's citizens (I 've seen considerable amount of examples of these).
For the license part I really don't get the argument how can a coreutils rewrite can get rugpulled this is not a hosted service where minio [1] [2] like situation can happen and there is always the original utils if something like that were to happen.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665452 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136108
That is not at all true. If someone were to change the license of a project from MIT to something proprietary, the original will still exist and be just as available to users. No freedom is lost.
MIT is a big joke at the expense of the open-source community.