That happened already, if you haven't noticed yet. Android has used Toybox (0BSD) as its coreutils replacement for a decade. I don't see any reason to particularly criticize uutils for this exact reason at this point.
The "community" in this case would be one having input to selecting which version of coreutils any given distro may bundle. That's typically not users, even in more engaged linux distro projects. It's certainly not android users.
And while any corporation is ultimately made up of individuals with presumably some limited autonomy in software dependency choices, it seems a bit of a stretch to refer to google
employees as a "community" fitting into this context.
That's an extremely narrow definition of the community in my opinion. And even that doesn't adaquately consider the vast majority who do have but do not exercise that autonomy---Linux container users won't care if the container is based on GNU coreutils or Busybox or Toybox, they only care about the image footprint. (And this made Alpine Linux huge in the world of containers.) I believe that, even under your definition, it is only a small fraction of that community who explicitly want GNU coreutils. Not necessarily good thing, but just a sad reality.
> That's an extremely narrow definition of the community in my opinion
It is extremely narrow, simply because that's the narrow definition that's relevant here. The gp was discussing whether or not it would be used - the people responsible for the decision to use it are... the people in the community making said decision.
This isn't a subjective debate on the definition of the word community. This isn't about excluding people on merit. It's just literally a discussion of who's going to make or break adoption.
I'm not sure what point you think you're making talking about users caring about coreutils - ultimately that depends on those users being engaged in the decision-making process.
Alpine is btw an excellent example - one can make a good argument that that example supports adoption of this Rust rewrite. The only point I was contributing is simply that Android is an extremely bad example to use in such an argument.
