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I feel like the title is being a bit sensationalist. As bad as the Rust Foundation debacles are, I don’t think I would characterize this situation as “Rust is being destroyed”.
Alone the sponsors of the Rust Foundation I find very questionable (Amazon, Google, Huawei, Meta, Microsoft, https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ on the bottom). Unfortunately, corporatism is what you get from corporations. Happy to hear about the crab-lang fork.
I doubt the corporate sponsorship has anything to do with the recent drama in the dev team. I also think it’s a very good sign big companies are sponsoring Rust, as it shows they believe in its potential and help its adoption.
I have not much of a clue about the recent dramas. Maybe it is not related. Yet I hope that at least now people take the opportunity to rethink sponsorship.
To me personally, this kind of sponsorship tastes bitter. On one hand, it does show that some companies are willing to invest in the project. The money is certainly welcome and it might be difficult to find other reliable sponsors. The big ones definitely have the financial means to create impact and sustain the project. But that does not mean that their interests are aligned with Rust users like me. From this kind of companies I’d expect that they sponsor projects in order to have influence. They want to breed an ecosystem which is good for their business. Unfortunately, their business is bad for my privacy, its bad for me as taxpayer (Google is a tax parasite where I live), its bad for fair competition. Everything they do, they do for profit. Even if it looks harmless it will be for profit or image.
Hence, there are things that I’d not expect to change with such companies as sponsors. For example: the Rust ecosystem is quite well linked to Github. I don’t believe that Microsoft would invest into changing that. The opposite.
To me feels bad if something like Rust which is about to become part of our daily infrastructure is under the control of a few monopolistic companies. If Rust gets mainstream, then those companies do not represent the people who depend on Rust.
I actually deleted my original comment, because I thought it didn’t contribute too much in the discussion. I restored it, as you went through the trouble to write such a long and thoughtful reply.
I see where you’re coming from, and I believe it’s a fair concern. My thinking is more along the line that if I’m ever to write Rust for a paid gig, it has to be widely adapted and the ecosystem has to be mature (at the moment most jobs using Rust where I live are some sort of web3/crypto shops, and I’m not interested in those). I don’t think that will happen any time soon without endorsement and sponsorship by the major corporations.
I have some experience working in the .NET ecosystem, and it’s not all that bad. One of the few Microsoft products I don’t hate.
Well, I think it does contribute to the discussion here :) . Even though the problems behind the original post might be different.
That’s also somewhat my dilemma. I really like Rust as a language and I’d be happy to use it also for my day-job. Unfortunately, I don’t see it adopted in the companies I work for.
Why are big tech companies questionable when sponsoring a project like Rust? Do they not also have a vested interest in making sure Rust is maintained and used? The recent corprotisation of Rust can’t be attributed to big tech companies (at least not alone and not majoritvely) since big tech also sponsor and fund many, if not most, big free open source projects. This is a phenomenom seemingly unique to Rust. The linux foundation has the same, if not more, massive corporate sponsors and doesn’t face the same problems. I want to know what is going on at Rust to cause these changes.
True. As an outsider I can only speculate what is going on there. As you say, other BigTech-financed projects seem fine.
About big tech companies sponsoring projects: The have an interest that Rust is maintained and many people write good crates which they can use. But they don’t care so much about the world being able to profit from the ecosystem. If they do, then just because this is actually profitable for themselves.
I think this turns into a problem once a project get mainstream. Let’s imagine that in twenty years Rust largely replaced C/C++. It would become part of the worlds critical infrastructure. I don’t think it is good to let the monopolies have the governance. I don’t believe that they act in interest of people. Often it may appear the way. But if it does, I’m convinced that there’s usually a business interest behind. For example, screwing people completely would be bad for business or might trigger the attention of regulation bodies. So they don’t do it. Screwing people very gently such that they get used to it before they notice might happen. Slowly boiling the frog. This type of companies do that on a daily basis.
Good point. I agree that decentralization is preferred. But I suspect that these massive tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google and the like) have enough money laying around that they think to give an open source project a decent amount of funding may cost them relatively little, but could give them a better reputation around the wide pool of talented developers whom they hope to employ.
Obviously, this will still generate profit for them, as better developers will produce better end products, but I don’t think it’s as malicious as it could be.
And obviously we wouldn’t want large monopolies to control any critical infrastructure. Oracle is bad enough.