That really wasn't the vibe I was getting.
There probably are legitimate technical issues with integrating Rust. That's fine; it happens. Maybe Rust will be better in the future (this was written in 2017, so maybe it already is). Or, maybe Rust will never be a good candidate for BSD. Any of these outcomes are possible.
I take issue with his tone, which is strongly reminiscent of Linus' management of Linux. He's welcome to be mean, but I would think long and hard about joining a community with a leader with such a disposition (I don't know Theo's history, so I can't say whether this is a pattern).
Being kind when running a project, especially of the scope of an operating system/kernel, is very difficult. Not everyone has the disposition to do it. You'll get Rust-fiends and Go-phers and all sorts of people who haven't contributed a single line come in and make wild suggestions that don't make sense, every day. You'll get HackerNews armchair commentators like me who think their opinion matters. In the face of this, its understandable to respond with scorn. But; enviable leaders instead form measured responses. You never make it personal. You never shut the door on suggestions.
Open Source, especially at BSD's scale, is not a one man army. Thousands of people have helped with that project, and its creator no longer has the blank check to be a dictator.
An excerpt from Bezos' 2010 Princeton commencement address [1]:
> I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”
> I have a vivid memory of what happened next and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”
[1] https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/jeff-bezos-to-princ...