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Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

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Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#351

Post by toyg »

alexvoda wrote: post #297
arp242 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about effective advocacy. Stallman can think or do whatever he wants, but he is not and has never been an effective advocate. And from an advocacy position, ideological purity almost never works. An advocacy organisation like the FSF should be pragmatically "climbing the ladder" one step at a time, not insisting on an instantaneous revolution. You might as well advocate for the moon to be painted blue: it's just…

Unfortunately I don't even believe Stallman is as ideologically pure as people like too believe he is. I think he is much more attached to his own ideas and realisations than he is to the overarching idea of software freedom. And to support that argument I bring three anecdotes. 1. He is much more attached to his own creation, the GPL, as a tool for driving software freedom and as a "hack" on top of copyright. As suc…

1. Obviously you don't need licenses without copyright; but copyright will never go away, it's just too good an invention for too many fields of endeavour. FSF and GNU have never been anti-copyright and never will be, and that's just fine.

2. Nobody stops anybody from creating new licenses, in fact many many projects tried to do just that (MPL etc). Most of them fail simply because you cannot have your cake and eat it too, you either allow some things or you don't. You either require source code for programs users interact with on the network, or you don't; I'm not sure what middle ground is there to find. If you want to release certain parts of a website but not others, you can do it already in many areas - any SPA client-side code can be covered by GPL 3, for example. AGPL in many ways was a proto-GPL3, and it's to the FSF's credit that they didn't drop it, but actually updated it when v3 came about. They even try to explain the differences with dedicated documentation [0].

[0] https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#352

Post by arp242 »

toyg wrote: post #346
arp242 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Source delivered" can mean many different things though. Stallman's position is essentially that the source must be delivered in a way that respects the four freedoms and any compromise on that is "unethical" and not worth pursuing. My position is that we should start with just having access to the source under any terms, no matter how restrictive, and then move from there. > I didn't downvote you Just to clarify: I…

> we should start with just having access to the source under any terms Lol. Windows source code has been available under severely-restricted terms, officially for academic purposes, for what, 20 years? It didn't do any good. I've seen these debates for 25 years by now, they are always the same.

What I mean is "required to ship it with every copy as a matter of right to repair", as I mentioned a few comments early.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#353

Post by toyg »

arp242 wrote: post #344
toyg wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, this has been said over and over basically since GNU existed. "You need to compromise!!!11!!one!". FSF and GNU are not about compromises. If they were, they'd have stuck to the original Unix distributions and all their licensing grey areas. Instead they didn't, and the world is better for it. Why should they change now...?

> Instead they didn't, and the world is better for it. Why should they change now...? So this is where we fundamentally disagree: I do not think the world is better off with an uncompromising FSF. I think the world and state of Free Software would have been significantly more advanced if they had adopted a more pragmatic attitude. I don't think that's "compromising" per se, but rather accepting that things don't chan…

I mean, no hard FSF/GNU, no GPL, no Linux - with only the BSD/MIT license around, any good kernel feature would have been simply coopted and repackaged like the TCP stack was, keeping commercial software always ahead. From that perspective, the world is undoubtedly better off like this. Even the projects that compromised just a little bit with LGPL often got swallowed: see KHTML, for example.

> consider an alternative universe where the FSF and/or GNU had invested in to a good code hosting platform

FSF/GNU were created by nerdy hippies, expecting them to ever be great at running such a service is unrealistic. Besides, they did provide platforms, they just were never as good as commercial alternatives.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#354

Post by toyg »

arp242 wrote: post #342
pjlegato wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a direct result of Stallman's uncompromising disinterest in what values people in the broader world actually wanted to engage with -- instead attempting to dictate his own moral views as a petty tyrant -- GNU _as a project_ hasn't been relevant to computing for decades. When was the last time you booted up the Hurd kernel? I would be surprised if more than 10% of HN readers even know what that is. (Stallman actual…

GNU wants to recreate a 1988 Unix. That's not necessarily a bad thing – I'm an old Unix beardy type myself as well – but it's not really how you stay at the forefront of computing, yeah. Also didn't help Stallman alienated the GNOME and GTK people so they're not longer GNU projects (and they were independent for a long time before that anyway). There are still some important GNU projects though, GCC, GNU libc, and Gr…

> didn't help Stallman alienated the GNOME and GTK people

I don't know the details but, I mean, GNOME/GTK people themselves have been very good at alienating folks of all sorts...

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#355

Post by toyg »

arp242 wrote: post #345
toyg wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody listens to him" and still the likes of Microsoft now develop predominantly in the open. You don't need to persuade everyone, sometimes it's just enough to witness your truth. Ask christians.

> "Nobody listens to him" and still the likes of Microsoft now develop predominantly in the open. Stallman had exactly zero influence on that shift.

That shift is the result of millions of other little shifts made over the last 4 decades, which he definitely had a hand in enabling.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#356

Post by toyg »

arp242 wrote: post #352
toyg wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should start with just having access to the source under any terms Lol. Windows source code has been available under severely-restricted terms, officially for academic purposes, for what, 20 years? It didn't do any good. I've seen these debates for 25 years by now, they are always the same.

What I mean is "required to ship it with every copy as a matter of right to repair", as I mentioned a few comments early.

There is no "right to repair" without the 4 freedoms. You can't "repair" if you cannot inspect and run (0 and 1), and your repair is fundamentally meaningless if you cannot communicate it (2 and 3).

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#357

Post by toyg »

arp242 wrote: post #205
toyg wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... LibreOffice, MariaDB, Openbox ... and if we consider forks of the community rather than raw code, we must also mention GNOME.

I don't think they really did much for their parent project though? They're just forks that are more successful than the parent, but that's a different thing. My point was mostly that forking doesn't need to be a zero-sum game and that everyone can benefit from it.

I believe the now-Oracle projects benefit significantly from code pushed to the forked versions.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#358

Post by starkparker »

nindalf wrote: post #192

This fork promises "All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy!" Compelling, until you realise that all the commits are auto-merges of rust-lang/rust's main branch. Which means the same teams doing the same work, under a different name. Rust is experiencing growing pains because they're still figuring out a governance structure that works for everyone. They want to simultaneously keep th…

https://github.com/orgs/crablang/projects/4?pane=issue&itemI...

> crab #51

> create experimental branch

> opened last week

> just need to create the experimental branch

> it will start from the current state of our master branch, which is currently synced with upstream project but afterwards will not receive updates unless they can be incorporated without too many conflicts.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#359

Post by MuffinFlavored »

weinzierl wrote: post #55

I disagree with the general sentiment in this thread that this is a useless immature move. Sure, Crab will almost certainly not replace Rust, but that is not the goal. The ultimate objective is to influence Rust stakeholders' decisions. This is similar to a strike where ultimately your goal is not to destroy the company or to quit and leave, but to achieve better conditions. In both cases it sometimes works and somet…

> Sure, Crab will almost certainly not replace Rust, but that is not the goal.

I see it as: there's a finite amount of people who choose to dedicate their unpaid free time contributing to making Rust better (working on fixing bugs, new features, etc.)

This seems like fragmentation which basically will slow down progress. Now, obviously the people who choose to dedicate their free time to open source software are entitled to do whatever they want with it. I don't know the details of what part of what leadership is doing what that equates to "being a meanie" and I don't know who is "being dramatic" and who isn't.

All I know is, I'm grateful for their contributions and wish everybody could get along. This is kind of "not a good thing" for progress when you look at it from a delivery perspective.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#360

Post by arp242 »

toyg wrote: post #356
arp242 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is "required to ship it with every copy as a matter of right to repair", as I mentioned a few comments early.

There is no "right to repair" without the 4 freedoms. You can't "repair" if you cannot inspect and run (0 and 1), and your repair is fundamentally meaningless if you cannot communicate it (2 and 3).

> your repair is fundamentally meaningless if you cannot communicate it (2 and 3).

I have spent significant amount of time working around bugs and limitations in proprietary software that could have been fixed easily otherwise, and simply being able to fix it for myself or our company would absolutely be beneficial.

This is so staggeringly blindly obvious that it pains me that this is even a point of contention. Of course things would be better if you can also share, but merely being able to repair is also useful in and of itself. This is exactly the sort of Stallmanistic attitude that's impeding any sort of progress, and why we'll still be having the same discussion 30 years from now with no significant movement in the grand scheme of things.

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