I think this interview with the uutils project lead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qTyyMyU2hQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qTyyMyU2hQ is fairly telling ab

I think this interview with the uutils project lead https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qTyyMyU2hQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qTyyMyU2hQ is fairly telling about the motivation behind the project. He mentions that he's not motivated by memory safety and that the GNU coreutils don't have security problems. The discussion gets interesting when the hosts start talking about software licensing. The GNU coreutils are of course GPL licensed, while uutils is MIT licensed. The lead says that he doesn't care about how the project is licensed, as long as it's OSI-approved, and that talking about software licenses is a waste of time. However, at one point (while the hosts are talking about reasons why a user might choose uutils instead of the GNU coreutils), one of the hosts refers to a discussion they'd had with the lead prior to the recorded interview about how car companies were using uutils for "compliance reasons", and asks if that's related to some sort of EU regulation about memory safety. The lead has to correct him, and says that the car companies weren't concerned about memory safety compliance, but GPL compliance. Combined with other statements he makes about purposely not looking at the original coreutils code to avoid any claims of the implementation being "tainted" by GPL code (seems like a lot of work for someone who doesn't care about software licensing), it seems like a major motivating factor behind the uutils project is to create a permissively licensed drop-in replacement to the GNU coreutils.