That has to be the absolute dumbest take ever.

Nothing about this suggests they will put "subscription barriers" on anything.

Stop scaremongering

There's lots of good reasons to use rust over C.

Even if it was GPL, since they developed the tools, they can still dual licence. It just means any third party contributions added to the GPL code couldn't be added back into the proprietary one. That's what GPL helps protect against.. It doesn't stop the original developers releasing a commercial version at all.

Not that there is any evidence they would.. If they were trying to achieve that, you wouldn't target coreutils (you'd target more profitable things, like a desktop environment, or drivers)