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I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

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Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#231

Post by ljm »

This is a naive take, I admit, but...how does Amazon co-opt the Rust Foundation without the Rust Foundation allowing Amazon to co-opt it?

Is Amazon hiring existing members of the Rust Foundation such that they weren't involved with Amazon but now are? e.g. paying these people to work on Rust but under Amazon's terms?

Isn't it then up to the Rust Foundation to declare this a conflict of interest, perhaps, and to sever ties with that member?

That said, Mozilla really did drop the ball by laying off all their staff on the Rust project and effectively defunding it. They might have well have created a power vacuum and Amazon beat Microsoft to the punch.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#232

Post by stuaxo »

sk2020 wrote: post #220
mjw1007 wrote: post #25

The Rust Foundation has indeed been disappointingly opaque. Their website contains only anodyne director bios and board meeting minutes. The minutes go up to May's meeting, with most of the content omitted under a "Private Session" heading. AIUI the main need for a foundation was so they could own the Rust domain names and trademarks. Eight months later, I've seen no announcement on whether any progress has been made…

I don’t actually see how Amazon stewardship is a bad thing. Corporate custody has been the case for several useful programming languages, with Java, .NET, and Go being obvious and popular examples. Replacing a core team of advocacy-oriented developers with production-oriented developers might give the project a positive new direction too. After all, a popular, design-by-committee compiled language with RAII memory ma…

Just based on the technology side: When using their systems a big thing, seems to be repackage and rebuild existing systems and create a load of new jargon. The systems seem to be islands, the effect is that at every place they are separated, billing can be introduced. Everywhere, where new names and jargon are introduced lock-in is introduced. I cannot see it being good for the medium or long term health.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#233

Post by stuaxo »

burntsushi wrote: post #170
hyperpape wrote: post #157

One confusing thing highlighted in the thread: the article says Niko Matsakis is "co-lead of the Rust programming language project". Niko is a long-term participant in Rust, and former core-team member ( https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core ), who's made huge contributions. However, it's not clear to me what that co-lead reference means. The closest that comes up is that he's a co-lead of the rust language…

"co-lead of the Rust programming language project" is a categorical error. There is no such position. The article has a mistake. Niko is co-lead of the language team.

I guess there is that position, "at Amazon", and writing that was a bit of a tell about how they see ownership already.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#234

Post by wting »

There's too much money in Rust, and many power brokers at play here from Google, Amazon, MS, et al. People are incentivized by money and career growth to lead Rust's future. I think core members should be the one leading the foundation, but there are a few reasons this hasn't happened:

1. Core members are burnt out.

2. This is not their primary skill set (administration vs engineering/community building).

Other languages have been blessed with an administrative group (GvR/Python[0], Hickey/Clojure), corporate sponsor (Pike/Go), or committee (C++, Java). The counterpart for Rust is core member/Mozilla, but there is no appetite for this responsibility.

0: I like this talk about governance models at Pycon 2019, after GvR stepped down as BFDL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAC83JVDzL8

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#235

Post by ncmncm »

xdavidliu wrote: post #193
codesections wrote: post #75

The platinum members of the Rust Foundation are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Mozilla, and Huawei. I'd pretty much prefer that none of those companies have any role in defining Rust – but, instead, they seem to be about the only ones who do.

genuinely curious, has there been any evidence in the past of large corporations decreasing the quality of programming languages that they have influence over?

Companies do periodically try to take over C++. Several have sought to throw their weight around by sending numerous extra bodies to vote at selected ISO C++ Committee meetings. They do not often succeed at that, but some have continuously outsized influence on the process, at all levels, just by their sheer amount of participation.

The people they send to meetings on a regular basis do a great deal of important work, and they often disagree among themselves. But sometimes marching orders evidently come down.

There was a recent concerted effort to define a process to determine when and where backward ABI compatibility should be abandoned, which would have made it much easier to bring about such occasions.

Maintaining a list of individually unobjectionable principles seems innocuous, but it is via the principles omitted from the list being thereby made harder to appeal to that you can get bad results. And, the more there are, the easier it is to reject this or that request.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#236

Post by burntsushi »

stuaxo wrote: post #233
burntsushi wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"co-lead of the Rust programming language project" is a categorical error. There is no such position. The article has a mistake. Niko is co-lead of the language team.

I guess there is that position, "at Amazon", and writing that was a bit of a tell about how they see ownership already.

Or, ya know, a mistake.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#237

Post by [deleted] »

hdevalence wrote: post #227
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but try to put yourself in Steve's shoes. It is very hard to publicly criticize some of the behavior of a group you are a member of without burning bridges or deeply harming relationships. In another comment, Steve said he was not a member of the Rust Foundation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514771

Your interpretation of "a group you are a member of" as referring to formal membership in the Rust Foundation specifically, rather than membership in the Rust community generally* seems like it gets at one of the issues in dispute, namely, whether there is an effort by corporate participants in the RF to (re)define what Rust is. (*): "community membership" is necessarily somewhat nebulous, but Steve is, undeniably, a…

[deleted]

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#238

Post by ncmncm »

NathanKP wrote: post #57
dralley wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wrote a fluff article about how Rust aligns well with Amazon principles. Wrote a fluff article about how Rust principles originated with Amazon, which is rank nonsense.

This is from Niko Matsakis himself: https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps//blog/2021/09/08/ru...

As I note elsewhere, maintaining a list of individually unobjectionable principles seems innocuous, but it is via the principles omitted from the list being thereby made harder to appeal to that you can get bad results. And, the more there are, the easier it is to reject this or that request.

Re: I refuse to let Amazon define Rust

#240

Post by mrtranscendence »

pphysch wrote: post #158
keewee7 wrote: post #141

>I want big companies to be involved in Rust Why? Steve Klabnik is one of my favorite technical writers. He is also an anti-capitalist. Early Rust documentation contained a lot of references to influential 20th century Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg. I feel people like him should increasingly stand their ground instead of being apologetic about their views.

Big (Tech) companies, especially Amazon, are non-capitalist in the sense that are large bureaucracies with complex internal economic planning mechanisms insulated from the "free market". Amazon has tremendous economic planning capability, perhaps more than Stalin's CPSU ever did. That doesn't mean they are "socialist", of course--they are denizens of the mixed economy, "islands of conscious power in this ocean of unc…

This does not mean that big tech companies are not capitalist in the sense that ordinary people use the word "capitalist", nor indeed in the sense that economists generally use the word "capitalist" either. No critic of capitalism intends for their critique not to apply to actual businesses as they must exist (even Valve). It may be an interesting fact that firms are not organized unconsciously according to a price mechanism, but it is not a surprising one nor of any particular salience here.
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