I am absolutely sure all these (big) rewrites are sponsored by corporations to escape the GNU safeguards
Interesting idea, never thought of that and I don't think it is impossible.
But I don't see it, there are 400+ contributors and uutils group are students and someone working from home.
As I see it, we are finally getting new tools and all because we got new fancy fast and memory safe language. Community is growing, learning and making new apps.
One problem I have seen (thou I don't know about this project) is low code quality, but that's expected until we find best practices with rust.
But I never thought about licenses.
One thing I can imagine is even something like unconscious "self censorship", choosing more permissive license to attract more people and even corporations which will hire developers...
But I also understand that people want more permissive license than gnu.