Recently I have been following a lot of debate about Canonical reimplementing GNU projects coreutils in Rust. Much of it very negative and much of it very anti-Rust.

Some of the criticism is very practical:
It's crazy to waste effort reimplementing such a big, old, battle tested software just for the sake of a new language.
The reimplementation is incomplete and full of bugs, failing many tests.

Most of the criticism is about licensing. The reimplementation being MIT licensed instead of GPL. Its tin foil hat arguments about Canonical wanting to eliminate Free Software. A case which grows now the Microsoft has adopted that Rust reimplementation. It is supposed that this is Rust and the Rust creators cunning plan and the ultimate purpose of Rust!

Now, I don't really want to get into a discussion about that here, there is enough of it all over the net already. But it does prompt a question in my mind:

If I wanted to release my Rust creations under the GPL is that even possible? What would I have to do to ensure everything is in order?

First obvious problem is that Rust projects tend to have masses of dependencies, no doubt coming with all kind of licences. How can I be sure I can release binaries containing those dependencies under the GPL?

I'm going to assume that if I only publish source code I can license it how I like, GPL or whatever. After all I'm not including anyone else code in my crate(s). It might be a pain. for users if they cannot build the thing into a GPL binary but that is not my concern.

Returning to the original concern, is it really so that Canonical could not release their reimplementation of coreutils under the GPL?

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