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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

#521

Post by Xylakant »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #296
staunton wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ has an ISO standard, for better or worse. That's a different beast. Rust is defined by the implementation. Any hope for interoperability between potential adverserially competing forks is just wishful thinking.

>> Rust is defined by the implementation. Hopefully not for long: https://github.com/ferrocene/specification https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/the-ferrocene-language-spec... Hopefully Ferrocene can lead to Rust itself being standardized. To me, it seems inevitable that there will be multiple implementations of Rust, especially if Rust continues to be more widely adopted and used in new domains. I would also not be sur…

I'm involved in the Ferrocene project (1), so I'd like to clarify some things about the Ferrocene Language Specification. It is deliberately called Ferrocene Language Specification and not Rust Language Specification. The specification serves first and foremost the needs of the Ferrocene project - we just need a spec to certify the compiler. It may be useful to others, that's why we open sourced it.

It is not a specification that standardizes rust or prescribes any behavior to the compiler. It's a specification that describes certain aspects of the behavior of the existing rust compiler. It's neither comprehensive nor is intended to be. It follows the changes in the compiler. If there's a mismatch between compiler behavior or the spec, the spec is considered faulty. It is also not sufficient to write a new compiler based on the spec.

As such, Ferrocene is not an effort to standardize rust. We consider the Ferrocene project a certified downstream of the rust project. Any push to standardize rust would need to come from the rust project itself. We have not intention to create any such standard.

That said, there is some interest in building a specification for the rust language in the project itself - here's the relevant RFC https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3355

(1) I am one of the managing directors of Ferrous

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#522

Post by pie_flavor »

cookieperson wrote: post #512
pie_flavor wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They aren't working under the current leadership. None of them work on Rust and none of them plan to work on Crab. There is no point acting like five minutes fiddling with sed is the start of something big in the first place, but especially when the authors explicitly state that they aren't planning on starting anything.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#524

Post by cies »

bluGill wrote: post #516
cies wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I know about many successful fork. But forking a language (like including the compiler and the lang spec), never seen that work out.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#525

Post by notmypenguin »

coffeeblack wrote: post #22
dmeijboom wrote: post #14

This happened a while ago and was related to the trademark/copyright issue. It’s an immature move and I can’t take this seriously. All this does is creating unnecessary drama surrounding the Rust foundation.

Forking is an essential feature in OSS, its what OSS is all about.

Except this forks a language and tools, a language whose premise is a single opinionated path to nearly everything, aka the opposite of C++

This drama has already damaged Rust and it needs to be addressed ASAP

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#526

Post by toyg »

jntvjnvutnuvt wrote: post #273
toyg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly that's indeed how trademark law works - if you don't make even a token effort at enforcing your rights, they can become common names and effectively be lost. That doesn't mean one should rabidly go after every single possible infringing use, obviously, which is what the infamous drafted Rust policy kinda did. It's one of those things that are just not black and white, because laws say one thing ("be harsh all o…

Name one open source programming language that has its trademark policies like Rust.

I don't know why people read my post as a defense of Rust policies - I just said they are at the extreme end of the spectrum, that's not an endorsement.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#527

Post by toyg »

tialaramex wrote: post #275
toyg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly that's indeed how trademark law works - if you don't make even a token effort at enforcing your rights, they can become common names and effectively be lost. That doesn't mean one should rabidly go after every single possible infringing use, obviously, which is what the infamous drafted Rust policy kinda did. It's one of those things that are just not black and white, because laws say one thing ("be harsh all o…

> Sadly that's indeed how trademark law works - if you don't make even a token effort at enforcing your rights, they can become common names and effectively be lost. Can they? Give me examples of such trademarks being lost. Do make sure to check your examples. Maybe you heard say that Xerox lost their trademark. Nope, Xerox® is still a registered trademark of Xerox. > That doesn't mean one should rabidly go after eve…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

You might want to check your blood pressure.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#528

Post by alexvoda »

toyg wrote: post #351
alexvoda wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

1. My point is that by doing so they are not and have never been as ideologically pure as they and others believe they are. They are taking a pragmatic utilitarian stance instead of one based solely on ethics yet they chastise everyone else for ethical impurity (Stallman always swings around the big word "ethical") for choosing even the least bit of pragmatism. Their stance is fine but their hypocrisy is not.

Stallman is not a software freedom purist nor is he a copyleft purist. He is a GPL purist. Notice how when others created copyleft licenses that are incompatible with the GPL there was much gnashing of teeth. The discussion is never about whether the GPL is compatible with some other copyleft license, it's always about whether any other copyleft license is compatible with the GPL.

2. The popularity of FOSS licences to some degree depends on endorsement by FOSS organisations like FSF and OSI. Custom licences are actively avoided and criticised. The GPL3 does nothing to protect against SaaS because that is not a threat that was envisioned by Stallman at the time. He was more concerned (and rightfully concerned) about Tivo-isation. Tivo-isation is a Right to Repair issue and it is really painful today. But Tivo-isation and SaaS are just different sides of the same coin called erosion of ownership. By failing to more strongly endorse the AGPL and by failing to provide a LAGPL, Stallman and the FSF (Stallman's fanclub) neglected the threat of SaaS. The LAGPL would have probably had more impact than just complaining about SaaS at conferences. Eventually some projects like MongoDB switched to non-FOSS licenses and others like CockroachDB switched to the BSL which eventually reverts to a FOSS licence after a predefined amount of time. For all of these projects the AGPL would have resulted in almost no adoption, but the LAGPL might have been a viable option. The FSF failed at their main job of license stewardship by failing to provide the licences society needed while being one of the two gatekeepers of licence proliferation.

Note, by SaaS I am currently referring to PROVIDER HOSTED SaaS which implies a service provider doing the computing on behalf of the user. SaaS can also be just a licensing model like it is for Photoshop.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#529

Post by alexvoda »

riffraff wrote: post #322
alexvoda wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

how would an LAGPL work? I'm sure it's my limitation, but I fail to understand the space in which it would be useful.

The LAGPL should require a recipient (who only provides a service) to only release source code for the changes they made to the LAGPL project but not require them to release source code for anything built on top.

The same way someone distributing a program that makes use of an LGPL library is only obligated to release the changes they made to the LGPL library, not the entire program. You are allowed to build your proprietary GUI on top of the LAGPL base and offer it as a service over the internet but you are not allowed to hold any changes to the base for yourself.

The line of what is considered a derivative and the line of what is considered distribution are orthogonal and one of the 4 quadrants is currently missing.

The goal is to effectively prevent the introduction of incompatibilities through Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. Weak copyleft like the LGPL has been effective at preventing EEE without discouraging all corporate use. Strong copyleft is actively avoided in corporate environments but weak copyleft is not. The goal would be to achieve the same but in a cloud environment.

The space it would be useful in is preventing cloud providers from introducing incompatibilities between their offering and the original FOSS project yet allowing them to build services on top (GUI's, billing, etc.) which allow them to differentiate.

How this gets encoded in legalese is their job as stewards of the GPL license suite, holders of the copyright over the text of the licenses and social gatekeepers of license proliferation.

Re: Rust has been forked to the Crab Language

#530

Post by dizhn »

ezekiel68 wrote: post #256

It's a whitelabel copy based on policy disagreements, not unlike the "Iceweasel" (now Debian Firefox-ESR)[0] fork of Firefox. Just dawned on me after I wrote the first sentence that both actions targeted Mozilla offspring. [0] https://wiki.parabola.nu/IceWeasel_History

I have always had the feeling that Mozilla went through a transformation when they suddenly had a very strong power backing them. I am specifically talking about AOL and their very litigious legal force. Although the particular arrangement is not in place anymore Mozilla isn't what it used to be before it either. (The story of them going after the Firebird database people is all but forgotten today)
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