Git, the version control system Linus Torvalds created in 2005, spent its first two decades in C — a deliberate choice for speed and portability. But the Git project had been quietly planning a language migration for years, and during the 2.49 to 2.55 release cycle it began landing Rust components. The official BreakingChanges document was blunt about the endgame: Rust support would start as opt-in, flip to enabled-by-default, and in Git 3.0 the build options would be removed and Rust would become mandatory, no matter what build system you used.

The man who decided to do something about it was Enrico Weigelt (metux), a veteran German Linux kernel and X.org developer. Weigelt had already lived one fork: in June 2025 he announced XLibre, a fork of the X.org X server, after hundreds of his patches were repeatedly reverted and Red Hat employees purged his freedesktop.org account — wiping his repos, tickets, and merge requests. The Register covered the saga, and XLibre promptly attracted a huge following. For Weigelt, a de-Rusted Git was a second act in the same spirit: take a project whose direction you disagree with and prove a leaner alternative can stand on its own.

On February 9, 2026, the Libre-WD-40 organization appeared on GitHub with a one-line description: "Git with WD-40 applied." The repo, forked from git/git, carried a single commit by metux that stripped the Rust components and reverted the default branch to "master". The name is a joke with a point: WD-40 removes rust, and the fork removes Rust. Stars rolled in quickly, the Lunduke Journal covered it under the headline "XLibre Dev Creates de-Rusted Git Fork", and the first pull requests arrived within days — memory leak fixes, NUMA allocation support, and even a Fil-C port from Filip Pizlo's memory-safe C compiler project, wrapped in guards so the fork can build without a traditional toolchain.

Then came Git 2.55.0. Released on June 29, 2026, it flipped Rust support from opt-in to enabled-by-default, with a warning that Git 3.0 would make Rust mandatory. Two days later, Libre-WD-40 tagged its own 2.55.0 — the "WD-40 flavor" — rebased on the new release with all the Rust gone and the C codebase intact. Lunduke called it "exactly how Open Source is supposed to work." Whether Libre-WD-40 is a novelty, a protest, or the seed of a genuine long-term alternative depends on how much of Git's future stays C.

The impact of Libre-WD-40 is more symbolic than practical — Git's Rust migration is a decade-scale project, and a single developer's de-Rusted snapshot is not going to halt it. But the fork's real significance is as a pressure valve and a proof point. It demonstrates that even the most widely used open-source software on Earth can be forked overnight if a large enough constituency objects to the direction. Whether or not anyone runs it in production, Libre-WD-40 has already entered Git's political history: every future release announcement will be measured against the question of how much Rust it adds and who gets left behind. For the anti-Rust movement — and for Weigelt personally, after his XLibre saga — it is a badge: open source is not a democracy, but it does offer secession.