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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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s what happens, it’s not a great outcome. Foundation changes policy, restricting the use of a mark, to enormous opposition. After much dissent, the community responds by… ceasing to use the mark. That’s what they were asking for! The policy was bad. So is disinviting someone from a keynote address. The question is, do you want those things to be changed? Acceding to the demands and quietly backing away, no ma…

As an end-run around the trademark policy in the iceweasel style, crablang is useless. You can already use rust without being in violation of the trademark policy - you just can’t name your project rust-foo or call your compiler rusty unless it’s actually rustc. Crablang doesn’t change anything about that. The iceweasel situation is different AFAIR - Mozilla (IMHO reasonably) wants binaries that are called Firefox to…

> you just can’t name your project rust-foo or call your compiler rusty unless it’s actually rustc. Crablang doesn’t change anything about that.

My understanding is the intention is that you can call your project crab-foo or your compiler crabby and be sure that nobody from Crab is going to get upset at you. You had that choice before, too, but now they've come up with a common name for everyone to share.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the people in charge don't represent you, and you can't get rid of them, do your own thing. I see nothing wrong with this. It's an OSS project, people can do what they want with it. I doubt it'll succeed but who cares people can do whatever they want. I'm honestly surprised at the amount of people on here taking the side of "take the abuse from leadership and don't do what you want with OSS".

They're not doing their own thing. They're doing the same thing with a different name and have no intent to contribute original patches that don't change the name. It takes about two seconds in GitHub's UI to fork, and about five minutes of fiddling with sed to change it to the degree that they changed it.

Maybe they have a different vision for it. And sometimes people prefer to work under different conditions. The ends don't justify the means. People jump from one insurance company to another insurance company for changes in leadership every day. If these people don't want to work under the current leadership I'd say they aren't doing the same thing.

OSS is a free thing. They can do what they want.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand it could become a place to test ideas and port the winners over to rust. It’s not necessarily negative.

io.js (node.js fork) seems like a parallel. It split off to get away from Joyents advisory board that was slowing down development and the trademark issues around Node. It was more performant in the short term with faster development cycles. Once the issues with Joyent were worked out it was merged back into mainline node. Different political issues here so whether it gets ported back into Rust or becomes what Rust w…

Well, Joyent spun off Node as a separate org, and io.js's developers pretty much ran the dev side of the new Node.js org. So it really didn't disappear so much as replaced the upstream for the most part.

I think a lot of Rust's governance and leadership has left some poor impressions in a lot of ways and the Trademark licensing is just the step too far for a lot of people. I don't think the goal is to necessarily destroy rust, but definitely change the direction somewhat dramatically.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#514
post #504

Haven't ever used Rust and probably won't. Regardless, the melodramatic cliquey "I'm leaving the project" bluster as of late reminds me of my 14 year old self on various vbulletin forums and grants me conviction avoiding adopting this language and its ecosystem. I prefer the tools I use for building businesses to be administered by adults.

So what is administered by adults? JVM/Java? Well that has it's own share of drama (and businesses frowning upon the leadership of Oracle). For .NET/C# I cannot remember any drama, but maybe that's just MSFT controlling the PR of their project? The more something is governed in the open, the more we can see problems. To me that's a good thing. Compare Germany's govt to China's: Germany is certainly not as efficient,…

On the .Net side, MS has made some toxic steps with community projects, and the even removed features from FLOSS .Net to avoid competing features from Visual Studio (not Code). Not saying it isn't mostly positive, only that there have been missteps.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#515
post #6

The main website has an explanation for the reasons behind this: https://crablang.org/ More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583089

Rust was always a corporation/FAANG language when you looked at contributors and sponsors, so it's probably not real reason, I mean it is clear async was rushed out for AWS/Amazon and everyone celebrated it nonetheless. People like to hide motives

Considering how long it took for async, and the depth of proposals, I wouldn't call it rushed at all.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#516
post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the rust political decisions are concerning though. I can see the companies giving that money switching to someone else to avoid that politics. Time will tell, first the replacement needs to stick around for a while and prove to be a viable fork, which is hard without the donations.

When did a language fork work without new goals?

Jenkins forked Hudson years ago. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD. Many linux distributions are forks of some other.

I can't think of any language, but the idea that a fork can work has a long successful history. (And a large history of failure)

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an end-run around the trademark policy in the iceweasel style, crablang is useless. You can already use rust without being in violation of the trademark policy - you just can’t name your project rust-foo or call your compiler rusty unless it’s actually rustc. Crablang doesn’t change anything about that. The iceweasel situation is different AFAIR - Mozilla (IMHO reasonably) wants binaries that are called Firefox to…

> you just can’t name your project rust-foo or call your compiler rusty unless it’s actually rustc. Crablang doesn’t change anything about that. My understanding is the intention is that you can call your project crab-foo or your compiler crabby and be sure that nobody from Crab is going to get upset at you. You had that choice before, too, but now they've come up with a common name for everyone to share.

Sure, but the crab trademark is worthless. And you wouldn't need to fork the compiler to do that. The community, if it wished, could have formally or informally adopted foo as a naming scheme.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#520

I've invested in a fair bit of time in learning Rust fairly recently -- asking naively, but is this sort of thing something which could realistically compromise the future of the language?

This fork is just a symbolic act. However, the ongoing drama around Rust creates real damage. Why should someone invest in a language where there're constantly drama about social or political issues? The focus should be on improving the language?

I suppose that is my feeling too -- is there historical precedence for something like this in other languages anyone can reference?
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