Forks of a large project seldom survive, they almost always die with no active development. This is a futile move.
> Forks of a large project seldom survive
MariaDB? That fork was also the result of heavy-handed lawyering over IP.
Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
171–180 of 555 posts
Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#172For anyone critizing this: From the trademark bullshit to the conference drama, it's clear at this point that someone with influence in the Rust foundation is behaving like an asshole and damaging the project. That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others. It's also clear that others at the Rust foundation tolerate this behavior, downplay it, don't understand the impact, don't want to go against a "respecte…
I think it's worth reiterating here that there are two separate entities at play in the Rust community.
First, there's the Rust Project, a (non-incorporated) group of people that actually maintain the language and surrounding assets. They've been undergoing a "crisis of governance" for a couple of years now from what I can tell, and they're working on a new governance structure. This is where the moderation team resignation happened, and just a few days ago the RustConf drama.
Then there's the Rust Foundation, which is an incorporated entity and the legal owner of Rust's trademarks. They manage (corporate) funding/donations, issue grants, and manage some infrastructure stuff. IIRC, they have no official influence in the Rust Project (and by extension, in the language). This is where the recent trademark policy drama originated.
To be quite honest, I think this separation is super confusing and it should be delineated more clearly.
Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#173Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I share the spirit. OSS is all about forking. My company works with a very very niche TypeScript fork as well. Everyone should be free to work and contribute in the way he prefers for whatever reasons.
Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape isn't a good thing.
Why not?
Competition if anything breeds more innovation.
I wish someone came up, e.g., with an Elm fork.
Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its an example of a wildly successful fork due to poor leadership, without any other technical reasons. You can argue that “its different because its a community” but thats dishonest, because ultimately migrating an entire community is much harder than having an alternative development stream like MariaDB and MySQL. Oh, wait, another successful fork…
IRC is practically stateless, migrating is about as easy as someone signing up at the new host and changing your readme/contact page. If you have some bots you change some URLs. It may not be an easy decision, but the migration is a straightforward one time cost. Guess why a lot of projects moved off Freenode overnight? Because it’s very easy. Supporting a different language implementation, on the other hand, is an i…
Respectfully, I couldn’t possibly disagree more.
Everything you said is just as true for an alternative language. You can maintain compat (like rocky linux) or diverge (like mariadb), so it remains to be seen.
However the switching cost of moving your entire community is large and IRC is not stateless, pedantically it is a stateful connection, but you really mean that theres nothing you need to carry with you; but thats not true, permissions, identities, hostmasks etc. all of these tiny things spread across thousands is quite an effort and undertaking it is only done with a heavy heart.
If you maintain compatibility then it could be as easy as changing a reference or just calling another compiler (like the Java implementations). Afaik all CentOS and RHEL scripts work without modification on Rocky.
Either-way, I think I made my point, I am sure you are convinced of the inverse, so I leave this as my final word to other readers of the thread.
Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conflating product names with legal company names does nothing to help the discussion. The fact of the matter is I can have a business called https://learnjavascript.online/ but not one called https://learnrust.online/ , because the Rust team has decided they are uniquely suited to govern all usage of the word "rust" as their dumb little users can't manage to think for themselves and determine which resources are wor…
They are trademarks, though, are they not? Should I be permitted to fork Go an call it Rust? learnrust.com with fine resources to learn ru.. I mean go, no wait. Rust. Definitely rust. I am a user of Rust and I am neither dumb nor little, but thank you for your kind consideration of my mental abilities. But I think you are the one missing the point here: it has to do with the stability of the brand, language and envir…
> It's the Rust foundation that considers it's users dumb and little, unable to think for themselves and determine which resources are worth using. How could you in good faith read what I said and come away thinking I support controlling the availability of resources named rust?
Those are your words and I think you should own them.
The trademark process is there to prevent malicious entities from doing that. And in an environment where some brand has a certain value, there will be people that would want to infringe on it to have a share of the proceeds. Why else are we even having this conversation, if it wasn't for the fact that people _do_ want to infringe on the brand?
I went with the Go example to make the difference bigger. We can talk about the Crabs Language instead; imagine they take that language in another direction. (I don't mind that at all, doing so probably adds to the community of knowledge and information so I'm all for it.) But now let's also call them Rust.
What does learnrust.com mean, then? Which Rust? A new users or a company looking to hire resources in this arena, would you call them dumb and little for not being able to expertly tease out the differences?
Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#177For anyone critizing this: From the trademark bullshit to the conference drama, it's clear at this point that someone with influence in the Rust foundation is behaving like an asshole and damaging the project. That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others. It's also clear that others at the Rust foundation tolerate this behavior, downplay it, don't understand the impact, don't want to go against a "respecte…
As an interested outsider, it is indeed painfully clear at this point that someone is behaving like an asshole and damaging the project. Creating a hostile fork ticks both boxes.
Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote about this a few years ago in [1]. I think some of the more recent personal attacks have been unfair and misguided, but criticism of Stallman goes back decades. Why does X use the MIT license and not GPL? Because they found Stallman too difficult to talk to (see quote in the article). Many prominent people involved in Free Software have been at odds with Stallman for a long time. When I first heard of Stallma…
> A wiser and less ego-centric Stallman would have stepped back decades ago. I don't agree. For all his limits, Stallman maintained an ideological purity that is required to firmly signpost one end of the Overton window. Opensource licenses and projects can mix and match rights and regulations, but you will always have an unwatered GPL option, there to remind people of what the original ideal looked like. Compare the…
The puny weak souls shudders in the sight of an unbreakable mind
Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#179I was expecting this to happen, sooner or later, given all the drama around rust, it was just a matter of time.
I really hope this project doesn't take a bad turn, and succeeds.
Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote about this a few years ago in [1]. I think some of the more recent personal attacks have been unfair and misguided, but criticism of Stallman goes back decades. Why does X use the MIT license and not GPL? Because they found Stallman too difficult to talk to (see quote in the article). Many prominent people involved in Free Software have been at odds with Stallman for a long time. When I first heard of Stallma…
> A wiser and less ego-centric Stallman would have stepped back decades ago. I don't agree. For all his limits, Stallman maintained an ideological purity that is required to firmly signpost one end of the Overton window. Opensource licenses and projects can mix and match rights and regulations, but you will always have an unwatered GPL option, there to remind people of what the original ideal looked like. Compare the…
I don't think ideological purity is the problem here.