The discussion focuses on the ongoing effort to rewrite the Coreutils project in Rust, highlighting the license choice of MIT and the implications of this decision. One of the primary arguments stems from differing perspectives on software licensing, with some community members advocating for the importance of the original GPL license to preserve the communal ownership of Unix utilities. Supporters of Rust argue for its advantages over C/C++, particularly regarding memory safety, concurrency, and performance, indicating that rewriting Coreutils in Rust could address security issues inherent in the original C implementations. The debate acknowledges that modern C++ could offer similar benefits to Rust, suggesting that the reluctance to embrace new C++ standards has contributed to the project's need for a rewrite. Additionally, the binary size generated by C is recognized as a critical factor, and this could influence the decision regarding which language to utilize for Coreutils.