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 the current structure of bottom up development where each team (compiler, lang, crates.io, cargo) has the autonomy to make decisions for themselves, but the project as a whole can speak can come to a consensus and speak with a single voice. That's what this RFC tries to capture (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfc-leadership-council/blob/mai...). But the project isn't there yet, and is making these frustrating missteps in the interim. The lack of transparency into these missteps manifests as "bureaucracy" to outsiders like us.
If Crab lang actually attracted people doing the real work of development, they would have the exact same "bureaucracy" as teams tried to figure out how to build consensus and speak with one voice. The fact that they don't have bureaucracy is a direct consequence of them not doing any work right now. None of the crab lang people are involved in actually building Rust, as far as I can tell, so they might not be aware of this.
Lastly, I want to note that the top comment in this thread is blaming the Foundation, which is simply bizarre. The Foundation very explicitly tries to stay hands off on technical decisions and does not interfere in how the teams organise themselves. You may disagree with that decision, but it's an inaccurate characterisation to blame them.
> 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.
It started out specifically as a reaction to Rust's take on trademarks, so shipping the exact same code with a different name was the point.
OK but it says "100% less bureaucracy", although it doesn't actually seem to have a plan for that. Changing the name is... fine? Like it's definitely a thing you can do, for sure.
I'm not sure what that accomplishes - you can use this project and there's no trademark policy so... I guess you could abuse that if you wanted to? Like you could start your own "CrabCon" and no one could say anything about it legally... ok.
The "less bureaucracy" is the lack of the same trademark policy. That's literally it. They're not threatening to sue you if you don't include disclaimers on everything you do while using their language.
> The "less bureaucracy" is the lack of the same trademark policy. That's literally it.
Right, and like I said, that's fine. But it's pretty meaningless and actually has literally nothing to do with the language, which has no trademarks associated with it (nor could it ever have such a trademark as the foundation does not "own" the language). So forking a language over a trademark that doesn't apply to a language makes very little sense.
> They're not threatening to sue you if you don't include disclaimers on everything you do while using their language.
No one is threatening to sue anyone for using the rust programming language. That is an extremely incorrect view.
At best you could say there is a threat to sue someone for how they use certain terms or icons, but this is completely unrelated to the language itself. It's also completely standard. Further, the document in question was a draft submitted for feedback.
Almost any language is going to want trademark. Python recently had to deal with a troll trying to assert ownership over the branding because they had not defended against this. As someone mentions in an issue on the crab repo,
How would you feel about a shady company posturing as "The Official Rust" distributing a paid copy of the compiler? Does that seems like a thing we as a community should allow? That's what the trademark policy is for: preventing shady abuses of our beloved lang and community.
These things will absolutely happen - they have happened before to other languages!
I think software developers just have no idea how these things work. You know that every LICENSE.txt is a "threat to sue you" by your standard?
edit: Also, you're wrong. Their goals go beyond just removal of the trademark policy.
> The "less bureaucracy" is the lack of the same trademark policy. That's literally it. They're not threatening to sue you if you don't include disclaimers on everything you do while using their language.
Neither is Rust, so we're back to this being pretty stupid.
I normally scoff at controversy-spawned "forks" but I feel like the more important conversation here isn't "Crablang good" or "Crablang will replace Rust" but, (and this is evidenced by Crablang popping back up again today, despite not actually stemming from the most recent controversy), a general, increasing feeling of doubt or mistrust in Rust leadership.
Frankly, much as I love Rust and don't think this will ultimately stop its trajectory... it's really not the first time that folks at Rust have, how do I try to put this nicely, forged their own path and expected people to just deal with it. I still have a rotten taste in my mouth about the website redesign, and the near gaslighting around it.
(completely unsubstantiated, but I can't help wonder if any of this attitude falls over from Mozilla. Some of Firefox's treatment of user preferences and Pocket feel... well, a similar mix of ignorant and arrogant. shout-out to when Firefox had a floppy-disk-"save" icon that auto-uploaded your screenshot to the cloud, absolutely brilliant!!)
EDIT: Welp, sure enough, there's that [one name] again, associated with a vastly unpopular Rust decision, going out and doubly down individually and casting aspersions. What a shame.
> they're still figuring out a governance structure that works for everyone
If they are indeed trying to figure out a structure that works for everyone, I’m afraid they’re pursuing a dead-end. One should be OK, in principle, to not aim for pleasing everyone.
True, but you still need to figure out who you will please. Many of their directions are concerning to a lot of people. Even if the majority agrees with the decisions (which isn't clear), they can still be unhappy with the way the decision was made/announced.
> 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.
Open for a week. What's the matter, they're figuring out how to create a git branch? It's `git branch experimental && git push`, and running that would have been quicker than creating this ticket.
I wish everyone who read this thread yesterday could have also seen this - a shining example of the capabilities of the clout chasers involved in this project. They've delivered on their promise of "no bureaucracy" by avoiding software development altogether. Genius.
I think making a git branch which has auto-merging (but only if not conflicting with the upstream) is more time consuming than just making a branch at the current state.
More likely this involves some kind of release engineering; anyone who has worked on large projects will tell you that it's not an effort to take lightly.
Personally I feel like this fork is not really serious, but the issue might be that it either becomes serious or Rust's leadership will not change course.
So, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and quietly hope that I will never need to use crablang.
I'm heavily invested into Rust and enjoy the language immensely. Bureaucracy and slow moving is something I'd prefer at this point. There are only a handful of things I actually want added to the language.
The advantage of Bureaucracy is it gives time to think. I've approved several pull requests in my life that looked good and only latter realized while it worked it wasn't how we should have done things. (sometimes it takes years to see this, but sometimes it is quicker)
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 sometimes not and in both cases, just because it might not work does not make it an immature move.
It’s evidence of division and strife. They have allowed the environment to get toxic. Groups that were planning on adopting Rust will now think twice, as it’s future now looks uncertain. All organizations that produce something valuable face this test, it’s the ones that don’t fracture that succeed.
This. When tech leaders look at Rust as a solution for legacy products and services - then see Crab grab - it makes them think the ecosystem isn't mature enough for their 25+yr old platform.
No. Linux adopted it. MS adopted it (but that can easily be meanningless). So it is quite mature.
And you are saying that multitude of C compilers make C less mature ?? You are literally saying "tech leaders" use some kind of reverse logic :) Maybe Mozilla isn't Oracle but "trademarking" lang name is just Java-like move.
> 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.
You're making a huge assumption with the "unpaid free time" part of this. A lot of Rust development is driven by corporations who are directly paying engineers to work on it, and the rust foundation has a lot of money coming in via donations (literally millions).
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.
> A lot of Rust development is driven by corporations who are directly paying engineers to work on it, and the rust foundation has a lot of money coming in via donations (literally millions).
Then why are people set up about the trademark/copyright/license issue?
>Then why are people set up about the trademark/copyright/license issue?
For the same reason people go ballistic over myriad other trivial things (e.g. Twitter), they find drama entertaining and outrage is effortless and consequence free (for them).
I'm not thrilled with the trademark changes myself but forking because they posted a draft and asked for comment is absolutely dumb as heck and not productive. It just adds to the drama.
I think this essentially happened with XEmacs. It's been a while (since the 90's), but I recall that they had a different architecture and more advanced font support. I believe the latter was folded back into Emacs eventually.
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 was (or just fades away) is still TBD but who knows?
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.
So more like if C++ PLUS g++ where forked. Then C++ already had many compiler implementations before I was even born, and Rust has one serious one (and several other with explicitly different goals).
This assumes it doesn't slow down velocity/introduce time wasted with bureaucracy/trying to keep 2 separate codebases in sync/timelines/initiatives, etc.
Not to downplay any of your points, but as a counterpoint, I'm not sure this was true for Vim/Neovim. Perhaps I'm only looking at short-term gains though and not long-term fragmentation
> Not to downplay any of your points, but as a counterpoint, I'm not sure this was true for Vim/Neovim.
On the contrary. Emergence on neovim had a positive impact on vim speed of development, and Bram's attitude to new features (vim terminal, async, etc) softened a lot. He has also become more open to contributions from others. Even though vim-9 and neovim are on divergent paths they are both better because of the competition.
I believe the various BSDs would be another example. There have always been folks who argue that fragmentation/lack of developers/etc would kill them. Not yet, fortunately.
Maybe it'd be a good idea to just clean house and elect new people. Possibly even people who resigned exclusively and some people with emotional maturity.
If I were in Rust leadership, I would have a very hard time not seeing this as a personal failing and resigning. I'm not privy to any insider information, but this feels like a situation where I'd leave with a lot more respect for involved people if they said "I love Rust, and I need to step down for the sake of trust and the community.". But, much as some would like to imagine technical projects as being above it, PPP gets in the way (personalities, pride, politics).
Well. If you were in the Rust leadership, with such state of mind as to say "I love Rust, and I need to step down for the sake of trust and the community." I don't think you'd have hired a lawyer to defend the trademark ...
I would like to remind everyone of the time where NodeJS was forked into a more bleeding edge version of Node, and eventually down the line, all the changes were pulled into NodeJS and things were consolidated.
Or XEmacs forking off from Emacs in 1993. Although that didn't so much get subsumed but basically died a decade or so ago when most of the features XEmacs provided had been added to normal Emacs.
I was about to mention EGCS, then looked it up to refresh my memory: wow, that split didn't even last two years, crazy how the passage of time changes as you become less young.
I started reading up the history of gcc. It's really fascinating. Stallman made the first release 1987. This means gcc is 36 years old if you count the first release as birth.
Or the short lived "@ lang", a fork of typescript or javascript (I believe) that added annotations because the Angular developers really wanted annotations. I can't even find any information about it anymore, maybe my google skills are failing.
> We simply want to use [Rust] while retaining the ability to create content and promote its name, logo, and other assets however we please, without the limitations imposed by a trademark policy.
> The most basic rule is that the Rust trademarks cannot be used in ways that appear (to a casual observer) official, affiliated, or endorsed by the Rust project or Rust Foundation, unless you have written permission from the Rust Foundation.
So, from what I gather, CrabLang opposes this.
In which case, CrabLang wanted to use the Rust trademarks to deceive people into thinking it's endorsed by the project and foundation.
Which is an odd stance to take, because that's them saying they want people to use CrabLang to deceive people into thinking CrabLang endorses things it does not. ;)
>In which case, CrabLang wanted to use the Rust trademarks to deceive people into thinking it's endorsed by the project and foundation.
Instead, I see their statement as a visceral reaction to some legal threat they received that they don't think was valid. They probably weren't trying to deceive anyone, they just wanted to name their project "Rust Widget" or something and don't like that they are open to legal action from that because someone might think that's an official Rust project, when it's not... Even if most people would know it's not.
I'm not privy to any information in this debate, I just don't support your interpretation of their words. I think mine is a more charitable interpretation until further evidence of their actual meaning comes to light.
> they just wanted to name their project "Rust Widget"
That's already explicitly covered by their trademark policy.
> Using the Rust trademarks in the names of non-commercial products like RustPostgres or Rustymine, or in the name of code repositories in e.g. GitHub, is allowed when referring to use with or suitability for the Rust programming language. Such uses may also include the Rust logo, even in modified form. For commercial products (including crowdfunded or sponsored ones), please check in with us to ensure your use does not appear official.
> They probably weren't trying to deceive anyone
That's the intent of the policy they oppose, so... /shrug
One thing I always find interesting / amusing is how the timing of certain types of post here on HN is in a sense far more informative (e.g. by implication as to "what is the current zeitgeist that has suddenly made this "news" or relevant again?), than the linked articles themselves.
E.g. crablang wasn't exactly announced yesterday for this to be newsworthy in itself; but an HN top post on crablang almost serves as a reliable signal for yet another rust gossipworthy event being in the news.
Same with Signal/Telegram as a signal for WhatsApp; Telegram as a signal for E2EE, etc
It was posted in the comments to the 'Why I'm leaving Rust'¹ post that made it to the front page two days ago. At that point it was predictable that Crab would make it to the front page in a day or two.
Comments with links on front page items tend to turn into successful submissions within a day or two like that. Or rather, a fair number of front page items at any time turn out to have been preceded that way.
Agreed that this is one of the major mechanisms. But that's not the point I'm making here. It's a more general point regarding how the implicit "Why now?" question is often more newsworthy than the explicit "What?" being reported.
And also the fact that, unless the reader is willing to make a conscious connection to that fact, the lack of nuance often serves to swing a discussion in the opposite direction to what conscious examination of the timing would suggest (e.g. via the framing effect).
This is the power of the media and why people fight over it so much. Whenever you see content you should not only question the content itself but also ask “why am I seeing this now”?
I think one of the most influential factors of a topic making a top post is simply the timing of the post. The most interesting topic won't make it if it is posted at an inconvenient time for the largest audiences.
Politicking, back-stabing, power games, or even genuine but irreconcilably different visions and values are like 90% of corporate life.
It is almost deterministic: when collective behavior builds something interesting somebody will try to climb on the building roof to stick out and be seen and somebody else will try to prevent them.
The difference with FOSS is that such individual/community dynamics is out in the open, meticulously documented in git repos, so even a small bit of that behavior creates fireworks.
This isn't really a weakness of the model and it is futile to believe that this type of phenomena could be completely eliminated if we could somehow devise the "perfect code of conduct" or governance.
Hunker down, build good FOSS stuff. This, too, will pass.
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.
There's nothing wrong with Firefox policy that led to IceWeasel. Mozilla owns the Firefox Trademark. Someone wanted to avoid that so they created IceWeasel.
This is working as intended. There's no controversy, there's no one saying "wow I can't believe Mozilla would own the Firefox trademark !", it's just... how someone wanted to play it.
It's incredibly unlikely that this was necessary or actually achieved anything meaningful other than "Mozilla's trademark policy does not apply to this"... but that's a whole other thing.
edit: Actually, what it achieves is that Debian can distribute a modified Firefox (because I believe they may modify source code for it) without representing it as Mozilla Firefox, which is great. Again, working as intended - now no one is confused, you know that the Firefox you are getting is not the one straight from Mozilla.
I thought Mozilla barely has anything to do with Rust anymore. I assume they're part of the foundation or something, but are they actually setting/imposing any policies for Rust anymore?
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)
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.
Human rights are not political unless you're trying to reduce them. Mozilla justifiably did not want to work with someone who opposes certain human rights (including those of other employees), and that shouldn't be controversial or political.
I think they're dredging up Brendan Eich's opposition to gay marriage. But no, the latest kerfuffle isn't trademarks, either. If you're interested, it's all over r/rust.
If it involves people, it will be political. There's absolutely zero way to avoid it short of it being a single-person project (and arguably even _that_ will be Political at the very least).
Ah yes "there is always x, so why shy from this x?", I wonder if there's a named logical fallacy for this, I think the closest might be "Moral Equivalence"
There will always be drama, there will always be politics, but I wonder how entities manage to graze by with broad support in those situations, possibly by being equitable, consistent and transparent? Just guessing.
Python doesn't have so much regarding internal struggles of power, same for Linux (BFDL might have his controversies but nobody is seriously considering forking the Kernel)- and that's one of the largest FOSS projects on the planet. Even when things get super sticky (like nvidia) people still broadly support Linux and the direction?
Why is that? There's politics, but we're not really complaining that there are politics, we're complaining that there's a essence of abuse here. We're complaining that there is a distinct lack of transparency, consistency, and a broad lack of what many would consider to be morally OK.
That's not really politics, but you could just roll it into the same word if you're dismissing a project for troubling elements that are non-technical. Politics being people and all.
> Ah yes "there is always x, so why shy from this x?", I wonder if there's a named logical fallacy for this, I think the closest might be "Moral Equivalence"
I absolutely did not say that, and would not say that. The person I was responding to was making a comment saying that a language shouldn't be political.
My point was that it's impossible to have a language that isn't political, simply by nature of it involving humans. They will disagree. They will need to make decisions. They will change their behaviour to get what they want, either consciously or subconsciously.
> Python doesn't have so much regarding internal struggles of power
What....? Python has all sorts of political crap going on. Take a look through the dev forums and mailing lists. Look at the various groups and subgroups of developers, the way they interact and organise around different perspectives etc.
There was a whole bunch of that leading up to Guido's eventual stepping down as BDFL, after the long fight to get PEP 572 out (walrus operator). He even called it out in his stepping down email.
I don't see this as a real fork, the same way CentOS isn't (or wasn't) a real fork for RedHat, or Iceweasel wasn't a real fork of Firefox. This seems only meant to be work around the trademark. If all this does is to establish an other, non-trademark encumbered name you can use to refer to the language and the compiler than that could be good.
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 matter how much fun it is to add a crab emoji file extension, will not achieve that on its own.
If a whole slew of things were only available in Crab, the Rust trade mark would be devalued. That would be the one coherent theory of why you would launch such a project and try to get others on board. And it is why Ashley G Williams was commenting in that Register piece on the lack of technical talent (“language designers”) that had jumped ship. Commitment of talent and effort and resources is by and large what makes the trade mark valuable. People who are important to the project leaving is the only useful measure of an effective protest.
Since the Crab project fails to mention any specific people who have signed on, or even who decided to create it, I don’t see it having any impact whatsoever. The Rust Foundation will not feel threatened by this. I suspect the maximum it can be is just another IceWeasel. That is certainly the vision laid out by this person on one of the issues, who despite posting as if they created it, is careful to disclaim any responsibility for the project or to call any of the decisions their own. (Come on!) https://github.com/crablang/crab/issues/14#issuecomment-1508...
It’s also the vision laid out on the website: “promoting the language without worrying about the litigation associated with trademark infringement.” Basically the project has outlined the least ambitious possible goals and apparently nobody is willing to sign their name on it. My advice is to write an open letter and open it for signatures instead.
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 be unmodified Firefox to avoid confusion, bug reports etc. Debian didn’t want to respect that policy and this decided to fork and patch, renaming the project to comply with the policy. You can do the same for rust, but that’s not what crablang does, at least now.
> 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 <crab->foo as a naming scheme.
Interesting, how many negative comments this gets. People seem to love monoculture run by committees.
This is exactly what OSS is all about. Take a code base and develop it into different directions. Both code and organization. And "natural selection" will have some forks die and others strife.
I like languages that are a monoculture. It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants? It was a pain in the ass - VMS Fortran, Cray Fortran, HPF, etc... ("How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer" - pointers were variant specific? Ugh). Pulling the variants together under a common standard made it reasonable to build projects from multiple groups without having to know how all of the different variants interacted. If you pay attention to the post-Fortran 95 language standards, a lot of work has gone into standardizing what used to fall under the chaotic world of vendor specific extensions and implementation choices.
I'm all for the diversity that emerges when you have different libraries and tools that take on the flavor of each group that builds them. But at least establish a common language in which to build that diverse ecosystem.
It's easy when a project is new to adopt one variant and be happy in your little variant bubble, but when that project turns out to live for a while and inevitably has to start working with other projects or tools that rely on one of the other variants - you've got a headache, and life gets hard (and you'll probably start wishing people had just standardized things in the first place!)
> It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran variants?
For those too young to remember Fortran: Markdown is just as bad. HN supports an extremely limited subset, Reddit another, Stackoverflow, Github and Gitlab each have their own flavors as well, and MediaWiki also has elements that IIRC came from Markdown. And that's just the biggest platforms and doesn't count the myriad of libraries and bindings with their unique subset/superset and edge cases.
Stable project structure is a requirement to survive as an enterprise language, which everyone tries to make it into. It can live with the forks, but only as a toy language.
C++ survives having a GCC variant and a MSVC variant, not to mention whatever half-broken compiler you used to get for your microcontroller code.
I would argue the requirement is that each compiler is a stable project. But one language can have multiple compilers that aren't 100% compatible and implement slightly different subsets of the language (as long as there's a common subset libraries can choose to stick to)
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.
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 surprised if Rust were to adopt optional language extensions for specialized use cases, similar to Ada's language annexes:
Why? Because the Rust implementation you use for video game programming does not need all of the same features as the Rust implementation that you use for safety-critical embedded systems (for example: railroad control software).
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
Precisely. The naivety on display here about the realities of long term software development is absolutely astounding, especially for a project with such lofty goals. Keep your dirty laundry out of the public eye if you really care about Rust.
I agree with you on the “realities of long term software development”. But I think I believe there is a fundamental difference between the standard realities on a successful enterprise project and the language itself.
That is, the latter needs to balance the needs of a much, much wider array of customers (all rust compiler users) versus the former with a more specific target user base.
This introduces different requirements. Changes are far, far more likely to be permanent for example. Which means that the discussion around decisions needs to be different.
If you can't resolve that conflict of interest then you have absolutely no business being near the seats of power for a project such as Rust. Rust needs to be perceived as a safe bet, not as the next Ruby, if it is to achieve the goals that have been put forward by those that advocated for the language's adoption.
Perhaps, but it does need to be enterprise level (with all the things that come with it) if you want to be used by enterprises and high-grade projects like the Linux kernel. Many in the Rust community have explicitly stated that they want those type of entities to start using Rust, so being enterprise level is therefore a must-have.
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.
If people think this is useful then it's their time to spend on it; it's not our choice to make. If you don't like it then you can just ignore it. I really don't see the problem.
It's not our choice, but we can debate the choice. I think it's a bad choice, for many reasons, one of which is that having multiple competing forks that are all Rust but not quite isn't going to help Rust adoption and is going to cause fence sitters to look somewhere else. Whenever this kind of drama hits a language eco-system it is bad for the language, there is plenty of precedent.
I suppose so, but I don't think the effects will be all that large. And we can just as much blame the Rust Foundation people for putting out a trademark policy that's completely bonkers and more strict than almost any trademark policy (including those from Oracle, Microsoft, etc.) If you don't want people to take radical actions then don't do radical things.
Besides, a number of forks have had a positive effect on the original project: Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim, probably more.
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.
GCC had a standard to live up to (and it extended that standard in plenty of ways), the others aren't languages per se and do not and never did have the mission to appeal to the people that write non-sexy system software for a living. They value stability and a lack of drama in the suppliers of their tools above all else because any kind of fragmentation has the potential to cause them to have to (much) more work and they usually already have plenty of that.
And if the community was confident in Rust's leadership, this wouldn't be happening.
Which, to me, makes it seem that "hey, don't fork the community" is kinda brutally missing the point at hand, or at least feels aimed in the wrong direction.
Agreed, it's just that I seriously don't want to pay attention whether I should keep using Rust or switch to Crab. I simply don't want to care, I got plenty of work on my plate already.
The thing is, nothing is developed in a different direction here. The fork simply merges upstream changes, and has no current plans of revert introducing any technical differences. It's a spoon, not a fork.
I think it's an important aspect of free software that it can be forked. That doesn't me we need to celebrate all forks. Some are great. Some cause more harm than good. But most are simply irrelevant. This one appears to be in that last category.
If there is no real weight behind a fork than it is either useless, or might even be a detriment to the whole by fracturing the ecosystem. I feel this is the latter kind.
The downside to open source is the confusion around what's the latest, what's "most official", what's compatible with what.
In 99% of cases having one project however bad it is, means less confusion and more stability than several (It's funny and scary how this is exactly the one and only argument for dictatorship).
For the good of the project long term, evolution through selection might be best. But it's certainly not best for the short to medium term if talent is split, and it's not great for users to have to wonder which fork to use.
Let a thousand flowers bloom is a common misquotation of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Let a hundred flowers blossom".
That slogan was used in the summer of 1957 when the Chinese intelligentsia were invited to criticise the political system then obtaining in Communist China.
The full quotation, taken from a speech of Mao's in Peking in February 1957, is:
"Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."
And the reason for saying that was to get people to feel like it was ok to be critical of Mao, with the result being "reeducation" and death for any who did.
This is the source of my aphorism "Every Hundred Flowers Campaign is immediately followed by an Anti-Rightist Campaign". Meaning that if your employer is effusively soliciting criticism or "feedback", they probably just want to identify and punish potential troublemakers.
Agreed. I have no respect for the concern trolling about whatever hypothetical damage this supposedly does. If the Rust 'community' is so fragile that this toy fork is an actual problem then there is something fundamentally broken about Rust and its community.
This is not about code, it's about standards. As long as I don't have to have 2 Rusts to deal with, I'm fine with this, but right now at least the branding isn't supporting that.
If the majority of Amos (fasterthanlime), Raph Levien, Ashley Williams, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik throw their weight behind any fork of Rust, then that’s where I’m putting my energy too.
I believe they’re hugely responsible for most of the adoption of Rust and have no doubt they’d see continued success anywhere they choose.
Ashley Williams comments were sympathetic but unsupportive. I haven’t heard anything from the others.
Based on Ashley’s comments, I think the HN community has really overreacted to this story and treated it as something much bigger than it is. Im not sure there’s anyone at all notable involved with the “crab” fork.
I haven’t looked into it much though, someone may correct me. Overall though, I’m not sure this is worthy of our attention.
That's a very short-sighted way to read the room.
Doubt has been sown at a critical Rust adoption juncture, and major damage has occurred, and the stench will not simply blow away or only stick with the forkers, it's damaged RUST and The Official Rust People need to wake up and smell some burning coffee, or the dreams of this unique lego just evaporating while you claim it's all a tempest in a teapot.
Note: I have no horse in this race other than using Rust and wanting to have a stable unique lego for all things from baremetal to high level, which is here and being threatened by all this nonsense.
HN teapot tempest = something Official Folks better heed, or pay the price for... problem is, this strike is damaging the company, and management thinks it's no big deal...
Maybe it will develop into a true fork as you say. Right now it seems rather aimed towards influencing the committee in favor of a different type of monoculture.
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.
Honestly, the language and the community are mostly great. There's a few outliers that aggressively want to draw attention to themselves (which is inherently narcissistic).
That's not something that's unique to Rust in particular, every community has those. Rust's is still relatively small given it's only had a big uptick of users Recently. It'll settle eventually; it always does.
Also, I don't tend to interact or pay much attention to the bad apples in the community. So, I guess I'm just not that bothered by them. Ignoring them is the worst thing you can do to narcissists and idiots; it makes them go away to leech elsewhere.
Whether it's Rust or Crab I am not particularly bothered; the technical side of the language are a boon in themselves.
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, but it's transparency allows many to see it's inner workings are comment about it. I hope in the long run this transparency is what businesses prefer in an open source project.
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.
For 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 "respected contributor", don't want to lose their own position of influence, or behave too much like sheep to stand up for what's right. Moves like these target them. This sends the message "fix this or the community will move on".
Credible threats of a hostile fork have sometimes worked in the past to get a steering committee to fix their shit, see Node.js/io.js. It's no guarantee, but it's one of the very few weapons a community has if a project's leadership remains stubborn.
I met Stallman for the first time in ~1993-1995, in Paris. He was talking about the threat of copyright on user interfaces (the infamous "thrash bin" lawsuit) and (but less so) on software patents, speaking in the name of the League for Programming Freedom[1] (LPF) that he was leading at the time.
So this was a talk explicitly about programming freedom (and against the risk posed by excessive IP regulations), NOT about free software.
Everybody in the room mostly agreed with Stallman, but there was one guy, a shareware author, who had some objections to what he was saying, namely that he wanted some protection for his software and thought that his business couldn't survive without them. Stallman was not pleased at the objection, and began shouting at him like a madman, saying that he deserved to die (figuratively).
This happened again a few years later, still in my presence, this time against a representative of MuPAD, an organisation who had ported their software to Linux. Since I was the person who had invited MuPAD in the first place, I got my fair share of Stallman's burst of anger.
Needless to say, I found the first event bizarre, to say the least, and Stallman lost all of my respect, as a person, after the second event.
Besides his anger management issues, I think that he made a major mistake in focussing on free software as a goal in itself, and not on programming freedom, which could have rallied many more supporters.
> Besides his anger management issues, I think that he made a major mistake in focussing on free software as a goal in itself, and not on programming freedom, which could have rallied many more supporters.
Programming freedom might have been easier, but I think free software is a more laudable goal. Programmers possess exceptional skills and it's mostly our choice to use and produce free software, or not. One of Stallman's essential tenets is that non-free software gives programmers power over the users. Giving programmers more freedom only serves to strengthen this power. Free software is supposed to give everybody (or nobody) this power.
Free software moves the goalposts of freedom towards "sufficiently clued in user can operate and maintain free software", not "everyone of any skillset has a viable path to control their program". Programming freedom is the harder goal. Anyone can dump source code and say "yeah it's GPL now."
That's how it worked out that so much of the early stuff was, in respects small and large, "software for free, documentation for sale". There's no mandate for usability or conceptual simplicity. And we've only gotten better in the sense of having more developers interested in that stuff.
Agree on all points. Something needs to change in the Rust foundation fundamentally.
But as far as forks go this one seems quite low effort. Does the tactic work if the other side knows what you’re doing?
From Ashley Williams, former founding member of the Rust Foundation (I don’t support her pretentious tone here)[1]:
> "I don't think any of the folks who are part of it are language designers," said Williams. "They didn't even do a full find-and-replace on the word 'rust' the repo. But the community doesn't have a lot of recourse in situations like this besides making kind of ridiculous gestures [to say] 'hey, we want you to engage with us differently.'"
Personally I’d be interested in ideas for alternate governance models for Rust. Should package maintainers with over a certain threshold of users be given votes? Could strike the balance between complete direct democracy anarchy and an opaque small group making the choices.
> I don't think any of the folks who are part of it are language designers
Ugh. Hate this sentiment that some people are language designers, and others simply aren't. So pretentious. If someone is designing a language they're a language designer, they don't need your approval.
And yes, designing the distribution, branding, community, and leadership around a fork of an existing language counts as designing a language. Just because the speaker's "team" seems to be lacking in those aspects doesn't mean they aren't an important part of language design.
Regarding the "full find and replace", they haven't gone through to change path names because that'd cause far more trouble in synchronization with upstream than it's worth. Accordingly, they haven't changed source text that references those path names. Knowing which changes are appropriate versus the ones that aren't takes far more "language design" know-how than simply doing the "full find and replace" the speaker suggested.
The fundamental critique here is that a language effort needs technical credibility to attract a critical mass of contributors, even if the effort is solely for leverage. Arguing that a CEO is technically a designer because they make decisions on branding and leadership is an evasive dodge in the form of a critique.
At some point in the creation of a restaurant one may wish to inquire on the chef leading the kitchen without getting into a debate as to whether the maitre d' is also a chef.
I don't think they do need technical credibility to "prove" themselves as a fork.
If it were the case that all was well in Zion and nobody had any desire to leave Rust, then sure this would need to make a compelling argument on technical grounds. But that's miles from the truth: a large number of folks involved in Rust have wanted to leave it, and not on technical grounds. If this is the fork that can attract people who have technical chops but don't want to deal with the Rust bureaucrats, good on them. The progress made so far in splitting off while maintaining upstream compatibility seems genuine and nontrivial.
It seemed quite pretentious and dismissive to me too. Sorry, didn’t intend to imply I agreed fully with the quote. But there is a deeper point which is part of our root comment: is it a genuine effort or a negotiation tactic?
False dichotomy. It's a step forward toward a better experience for all who want to write systems code with strict ownership semantics. It may be acting as a negotiation tactic now, but it's existence is only possible as a result of genuine effort of the folks involved in its creation. And if it's existence causes Rust team members to continue to publicly out themselves as pretentious try-hards who take the B out of BDFL, then it will become more and more genuinely important and useful for someone to have already put the work into maintaining a real fork.
Context: Ashley Williams has publicly stated a desire to "kill all men", and explicitly refused to walk that back, or clarify it as hyperbole, or apologize for the sentiment, when asked to do so.
Acknowledging this historical fact has (for multiple people) been judged a rust CoC violation so please don't go asking about it if you still value being part of that community, for some reason.
And no, "kill all men" was not considered a CoC violation itself, because Williams is far enough up in the org chart that the CoC doesn't apply, as explained by the resigning moderation team back in 2019.
What a dismissive comment. I was unaware you're not able to work on a programming language until you get your Certified Language Designer™® certification.
Rust is on my list of things that I want to learn to use. I suppose that for now I can ignore the politics, but I don't know that I'd pick up Crab instead... what about all the crates, and cargo?
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.
I can fork the repos too, but unless I present a large group of credible and high-level contributors (that is, I fork the team too). Which people are putting their weight behind this fork?
The readme doesn't mention the reason for the fork, who made it and who governs it. Which would be the most interesting info. Edit: apperently there is a main site (https://crablang.org/) with more info. The most important piece of info is missing though: names.
I'd argue that devops is somewhat more important than names, which crablang does seem to be addressing pretty quickly - the whole rustup workflow seems to be working, which is a big deal. Names will follow as names deem fit, especially when Rust leadership (following the latest issue, that is both the foundation and the project leadership) keeps making terrible decisions and terrible reparations.
No, what is happening is a storm in a glass of water. _This_ is what is hurting the language and the environment.
You have to protect trademarks or you lose them.
Having a late change to a conference is definitely bad and sad but there is simply no need for that to imply a rage quit and all this drama. That is a non-sequiteur. Suck it up, make the talk on youtube (or somewhere else); I'm sure there are lots of people that wish to see it; I know I would.
> You have to protect trademarks or you lose them.
Let them be lost, who cares? It's not even a novel name, they just co-opted an existing word for their little gang and now don't want anyone else to use it.
Even Oracle, the chief lawyer-assholes of the industry, have basically given up on trying to own "JavaScript", and that at least is a uniquely derived term.
Yes, one of them should have the right to use that logo and name for VoIP, absolutely.
There are plenty of names everyone can pick that don't namesquat on an existing project. I find it especially nasty if it's a FOSS project that gets its name abused.
I'm not sure if people who don't double check the URL are the same people who would memorize or compare logos on a site... (which is in no way a defense of what's happening, but I don't think the other thing would help either)
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 worth consulting.
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 environment; I've invested a lot of hours into this and will continue to do so. Without the protection I would not because it could be gone tomorrow, basically.
> 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?
If you cant wait for the cool off period to expire before responding, consider you might be too worked up to make a coherent case.
For one, any reasonable interpreter of the English language would understand that sentiment was being attributed to the foundation, not me.
And someone wanting to use the word Rust doesn't make them "infringing". It's a word. It's a technology. I can use any other technology name to describe an offering, but I use Rust and it's a big deal? Hard pass.
Cool off period? I am calm as a jug of yoghurt my dear Internet friend :)
It seems to me that it would be educational for you to read a little about how trademarks work. The stuff that you direct at me has thorough explanations; these are not my opinions. To be honest: I'm not even 100% sure I even want the current trademark system, but I do understand the arguments for it.
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?
Nah what happened was whack and if they respect themselves or wanted that keynote to mean anything they should have quit. Saying "suck it up" is abusive relationship status...
> You have to protect trademarks or you lose them.
Not really. How do you imagine this could work if it was true? It's a great excuse if you're looking to throw your weight around of course. Oh the poor Disney corporation had to sue that primary school for a bajillion dollars, or else they would lose their trademark. Does that sort of thing even pass the sniff test for you?
And it works out great for lawyers too. Instead of only getting paid when there's actual controversy that needs their skills, they can collect a fee for this "protection" work.
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 of the time") and actual mores around enforcement say another ("leave people alone when they're clearly in good faith").
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.
Well, that's not exactly how it works. You don't even need to register a trademark to have common law rights to avoid source confusion. You have to use the mark though or you lose the rights, that much is true. But the only way you lose the right to enforce altogether is if you have some kind of unregistered mark and let it expire.
And even if everything you said was exactly right, they still don't have to enforce the trademark in every case to protect their rights.
As long as they keep making Rust, they own the rights to call a programming language Rust and they have the right to be identified as the official source and as long as they perfect their rights, they can use it to stop others from using it in certain cases, if they want. There's not really a "waiver" issue except in edge cases.
Things only become "common names" in the case (or at least it used to be) that they become generic terms in the language, like "Hey, go xerox this, get me a kleenex, and then google something." Rust will never be able to expand its mark quite like that because it is a generic term in other uses, such as iron oxide. They will not be able to control the production of iron oxide or who calls it rust.
So the whole "that's just how this works" defense is either one given by an apologist or someone who is just wrong.
> 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 every single possible infringing use
If this protection is somehow mandatory, why not? How do I check whether I'm "protecting" a trademark enough? Maybe there's a meter somewhere? Is there a scale? What are the units of trademark protection? If there was such a rule, we'd have answers to these questions. There is no such rule.
The best case for the genericization argument in that list might be Lineoleum, but Lineoleum wasn't even a registered trademark. So that's literally the story: Guy invents Lineoleun. Product is popular, other people make the same product under the same name, he's not very happy about that so he goes to court and says hey, that's my trademark. No it isn't, you don't have a trademark.
If it becomes generic it might as well be, but that's not the issue here. Anyway, the parent post has a google jd in trademark law and doesn't know what he's talking about, but you can't enforce your TM the same way, or if at all, if has become generic.
The main way you lose tm rights is by not using the mark.
Are you asking me to defend Disney's actions because I side with Rust at this point?
I think that it is fair that someone defends their name and brand and I definitely wish that you be permitted to do so, so that someone is unable to be too untoward to your business.
You keep making the claim that trademark enforcement is about protection against bad actors, but that is emphatically false here. Rust's trademark policy is extremely restrictive, to the point that Rust the language can only be considered proprietary. If you haven't read it, it's here: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/logo-policy-and-me...
They aren't using trademark to defend against malicious actors. They're using trademark to segregate and divide the Rust community into those who are "officially part of the Rust community" (their words) and those who aren't.
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.
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.
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.
If you check my posts on this subject I never said anything about this being big. I even said it'd probably fail.
I didn't know the authors had no intention of not doing anything with the repo. In which case it's just someone trolling. Which is also not a big deal.
This fork is and will always be 'ctrl+c','ctrl+v' of the rust language. The only difference is that the owners of this fork will not go after your business if you abuse their trademark. The presence of this fork means that rust foundation cannot enforce their trademark anymore. The day they try to, it will become a headline and all the businesses will start using this fork whenever they want to talk about rust language.
Talking about the language is something the trademark policy clearly says you can do. Everything that is a trademark violation under the policy is something that's really obviously a trademark violation for pretty much everyone, which businesses do not do very frequently.
he is... the free software movement fails without the hearts and minds of developers. Developers are, unfortunately, still humans and will refuse to follow the advice of someone they deem to be a twat. Even if that twat is right, if you can't convince someone free/open source software is better you lose.
Stallman is well known to act like a twat, thus holding him up as the voice of foss will convince people that foss is just a bunch of douche bags. thereby damaging open source.
It's clear that there's some collosal incompetence, but malice is not at all clear. Most of the recent drama plausibly boils down to communication failure. They're going to fix this, eventually.
Okay this is fine but will they have the commercial backing that Rust has from the likes of Microsoft and Mozilla and others? Are the languages different? Is the fork just to fix the management or will the languages diverge/have they already?
A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus. All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less bureaucracy!
Why CrabLang?
The Crab (or “CrabLang”) community fork was created as a lighthearted yet measured response to the growing concerns within the community about the influence of corporations and the restrictive trademark policy proposed by the foundation. This was not a "knee-jerk" reaction, nor was it an attempt to spread fear or cause panic. While the document the foundation drafted did lead to the fork, we believe it is an overdue solution to a problem that already existed, and addresses some issues that many community members have had for some time.
First and foremost: CrabLang is not trying to replace our beloved language. If you are happy with the way things are, we encourage you to continue using your language of choice. Our goal is not to fracture the community, but rather to provide an alternative for those who share our concerns and wish to have more freedom in using, creating with, and promoting the language without worrying about the litigation associated with trademark infringement.
We acknowledge and appreciate the hard work and financial support that corporations have provided to the original project. We understand the importance of their contributions, but we also believe that it is essential to maintain a balance between corporate influence and the will of the community. The CrabLang Collective aims to provide a space where the community can thrive without the constraints imposed by corporate interests.
We want to emphasize that we are not at odds with the project or the original language. We appreciate everything they do to make the language better, and our fork's main branch will continue to stay up to date with the upstream codebase. Our main goal is to ensure that the community has an alternative that aligns with their values and desire for unrestricted use.
The Crab community fork is driven by our love for a language named after a type of fungus. We simply want to use it while retaining the ability to create content and promote its name, logo, and other assets however we please, without the limitations imposed by a trademark policy. By offering a community-driven alternative, we hope to maintain a spirit of collaboration, innovation, and creative freedom.
With our shared passion for programming, we welcome anyone interested to join us in exploring the Crab community fork. Whether or not you fully agree with our concerns, we believe that diversity of thought and a commitment to inclusivity will only strengthen our collective efforts.
libav was the fork [1], and libav is dead now [2,3] (and many developers returned to ffmpeg).
libav was forced to rename their project because Fabrice Bellard, still owner of the trademark and the ffmpeg.org domain, did not hand it over. ffmpeg put in much effort retain compatibility with libav, mostly by merging all their changes wholesale, while libav ignored ffmpeg, including and most crucially, their security fixes [4].
libav was the hostile fork, not FFmpeg. Someone removed write permissions from key contributors (or contributor. I forget) and just about everyone sided with those contributors, thus the instigators were forced to rename their project. The development effort stayed on FFmpeg, even as the libav people tried porting back the changes. Eventually libav passed into irrelevance as it failed to acquire mindshare and distributions stopped including it.
It's been a while since I read the story but I believe it did prompt some changes in ffmpeg management, that's why I was saying it was a hostile fork success story.
> That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others.
Could you elaborate on because I'm increasingly seeing Stallman being thrown around as a bogeyman who impeded FOSS progress for years if not decades and I really dislike this trend. It seems that his personal views (which I do not support) and eccentricity is being conflated with his contributions to FOSS. I will preface this by noting that this is "my belief" but Stallman has been a positive force in ensuring that consumers today can work, play and do practically anything on a largely free platform. Via the FSF, his contributions towards the GPL license series ensures that contributions to the Linux kernel stay open allowing the kernel to improve as a whole.
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 Stallman in an interview sometime in the early 2000s I compared him to Osama Bin Laden in terms of extremism, which was a mean and wrong thing to do and I'm sorry I did that (I was young...), but it's indicative of the kind of responses he's evoked for a long time. Some of his ideas are good, but many are also silly, and some downright misguided.
You can have good ideas and be a bad leader of a movement. These two things are not mutually exclusive. A wiser and less ego-centric Stallman would have stepped back decades ago.
> 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 trajectory of the GNU project with that of Mozilla, for example. Mozilla compromised ideals to gain popularity, and now that popularity is waning the compromise gets worse and worse (pocket, pop-unders...). GNU compromised nothing, ignored ebbs and flows in popularity, and will continue to do their thankless work for the good of the community at large.
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 actually summarily dismissed Hurd's lead developer when he dared to criticize the GFDL in public. https://lwn.net/Articles/59147/)
Stallman's abrasive and confrontational posturing is related to but distinct from his ideological goals. His rude posturing actually _damaged_ the chances of ever reaching those goals.
Even the GNU "copyleft" license -- the project's greatest success in terms of "actually impacting the world" -- has fallen more and more into disuse in favor of less restrictive licenses such as BSD and MIT.
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 Grub being the most notable.
That is true today, but Linux didn’t have that much of a lead. People chose to develop for Linux instead when the future was in doubt, and that was largely due to the pragmatism of Linus.
I agree. Stallman can be subborn and arrogant and he often rubs people the wrong way. It is a character flaw just as it is a character flaw to not be able to seperate these issues from the ideas proposed. People that demand a sanitized environment have their flaws as well and I believe them to be far more detrimental.
People demanding his resignation would probably have installed a far less effective and competent leader. I also thought about Mozilla here that tried to set a new course which is as pale as the next corporate environment.
People that tarred Stallman certainly would be insufficient in any leadership position even with Stallmans perhaps very eccentric flaws.
Ideological purity is the point. A whole range of other options are available but ideological purity is what Stallman offers, with no expectation that everyone will appreciate its benefits.
The very existence of the FSF's offerings is necessary to understand what other positions compromise to obtain other benefits.
Henry Cavill is vocal (but kind and respecting) and an "ideologically pure" geek, in the sense that he seems to try and change scripts of series and movies he plays in, where they overlap with his nerdiness, ie [0], but there are more references. Of course, this is true in so far as geekiness can be seen as an ideology, if so, Cavill is pretty pure and vocal, but also just a great guy it seems. Now he’s going for a Warhammer 40k series and people are looking forward to it, because he knows his s*.
Come on! Cavill took a nice big pay check from Netflix and filmed 3 seasons of that show, fulfilling his contract like a pragmatic professional. I have no doubt that Cavill is a nice guy that cares about the things he claims to care about, but had he truly been 'pure' in the senes we are talking about he would have walked away a soon as he didn't get his way and not cared about his contract or future career.
Considering the hate against him by the entrenched non-fans that are seeking profit off the franchise, it is pretty obvious what his 'compromising' 'kind' ways got him. That he was well paid, and can use that as insulation is very much an outlier to the way things usually go, i.e. tar and feathering of Stallman.
Basically Cavill wanted the show to closely follow the books (books he was a huge fan of), and the show runners wanted to make changes to the stories and go in a different direction. This lead to a lot of arguments, and eventually Cavill being replaced.
Okay, but Stallman's non-purity related bad qualities are a problem for his own mission.
Eg, Stallman is reported as creeping women out in the link above. That has nothing to do with his uncompromising ideals regarding software.
So maybe Stallman could quietly retire to some sort of metaphorical ivory tower, and keep producing uncompromising ideology, which could be then evangelized by somebody less creepy. There's no need for compromise even. The same ideology just has to be delivered by somebody with better people skills.
That would be ideal, yes. But there also needs to be a bit of a culture change away from Stallmanism ("we want absolute Software Freedom now and anything even slightly short of that is unethical!) to a more pragmatic attitude and outlook.
This starts with simple things like not picking fights with the BSD projects only because they allow non-free software in ports and not alienating many lead developers of the most successful project that uses your license (Linux).
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 change in a day.
Also consider an alternative universe where the FSF and/or GNU had invested in to a good code hosting platform and a system to setup payments for people developing software instead of the ecosystem rolling from one proprietary platform to another over the last 25 years.
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.
I don't mean to imply he committed a crime. I'm saying that he's odd and offputting to many people, which is hardly news. And while I've not seen him recently in person, everything I've read firmly indicate that he's very stuck in the past and his manners are not up to modern standards.
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 not going to happen, no matter how right you are.
You absolutely can achieve short-term wins without losing the long-term picture. The idea that any compromise somehow diminishes the longer term ideals is just wrong. Consider a law that states that purchasing software must come with the source code (under any proprietary license/NDA) as a matter of "right to repair". This would be a complete non-starter for ideological purists because it's not True Freedom, but clearly it would be a huge improvement over the current situation. This is how the ideological purity is impeding progress.
The reasons for Firefox's decline are unrelated to "compromised ideals" (which have IMO been hugely overstated in the first place). Quite frankly, no one cares about any of this outside of a relatively small group of people. If Mozilla had been more "ideologically pure" they never would have implemented DRM and would be considerably more irrelevant today. If you think "oh, this new browser has more Freedom (a concept you need to spend 10 minutes explaining in the first place) but you can't watch Netflix with it" is going to convince many people then you're sorely mistaken.
The fact is: Firefox started declining as Chrome was just a better browser. That's all there is to it. Firefox Quantum significantly improved things, but it seems it was "too little, too late". All the cases where Free Software is a resounding success is because it's the best possible software for the problem, and the cases where it's not is because it's not the best software for the problem.
Free Software will succeed if it's the best solution, so that's where the effort should go, not the (frequently minor or even petty) stuff Stallman keeps banging on about.
Edit: the fact that this got downvoted in less than a minute – hardly enough time to actually read the post – is also part of the problem. I don't really care about downvotes, but it's indicative of the kind of hostility that makes these kind of internal community discussions hard. My article that I previously mentioned got posted to HN, where it was promptly flagged[1], seemingly because some pro-Stallman people were upset by it. Fine, whatever, I didn't even care enough to email dang about it, but it does make these discussions a lot less constructive than they can be. I received more emails and private communication about this article than everything else on my website combined, almost all positive by people who appreciated a more nuanced take than "Stallman == atrocious" or "Stallman == secondComing(Jesus)", so clearly it wasn't all that bad. But on HN it was "censored" – for lack of a better word. I'm not directing this at you – your comment was constructive and fine – but in general it can be hard to have these discussions.
> Stallman can think or do whatever he wants, but he is not and has never been an effective advocate.
Stallman has been right more often then wrong and has made his points forcefully, consistent and without compromise over decades. He's backed up his words with his deeds, has contributed an incredible amount of software and has been a very important factor in jumpstarting the free software movement. He provided a framework and a set of mechanisms for sharing software in a way that effectively aligns the rights of various parties, has convinced millions of programmers to give away the fruit of their labor for the betterment of the world in general and the relationship of end users with software in particular.
I really don't see what else one could wish for in an effective advocate.
I have spent too long being right but an arsehole. I never got my ideas into production that way, even though the existing codebase was patently a trough of piss. I learned to stfu and, generally, they came round. Don't rub people's noses in it, especially if they make decisions you care about.
There is almost no issue so black-and-white that a person can't find a technical justification for any given point of view. So don't drive people to oppose you from simple bloody-mindedness.
Someone who doesn't alienate a significant part of the community would be a good start (which all occurred long before the whole business with the Minsky comments). That he jump-started things or "is right" isn't actually all that important for effective advocacy; if I were to start my reply with "you asshole!" then you're not very likely to listen to what I have to say. To be honest I don't understand how people fail to understand there's a difference between "being right" and "being someone people listen to".
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 such, he is pro-copyright and pro-IP (intellectual property) in general (but against just software patents). Because without copyright the GPL could not exist. But without intellectual property, everything becomes reverse engineer-able and decompile-able and any available source code is effectively free. Copyleft and the GPL are not enforceable in a world without copyright but they are also not as necessary. I confirmed this position directly with him and also through the articles he wrote.
2. He is more attached to the GPL as his brainchild than any other variant. As such the AGPL (not created by him) has always been a bastard cousin and his organisation never bothered to create a LAGPL (like the LGPL and AGPL combined) even though it was requested several times. The GPL has allowed the rise of SaaS and the AGPL is unpopular because of how strict it is and therefore it was rarely used. A LAGPL would have been a middle option that would have forced SaaS corporations to contribute back to the community and could have had a grater impact than the AGPL.
3. With regards to microcode his position is asinine. He would prefer hardware for which the user is simply unable to change the microcode (even if it is broken) just to avoid blobs. He is not pushing for opening up the blobs. He is not pushing for Free as in freedom microcode. He is not pushing for reverse engineering the blobs.
Yes, I agree; that's what I meant with "ego-centric". [1] is a good example: "It is OK to call it GNU when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it GNU/Linux so as to give Torvalds some credit". Seriously? Calling some Linux distro "GNU" is "OK"? How gracious that he wants to give this little upstart student from Finland "some credit" as well.
As for microcode: IMHO Stallman is just wrong about it. He's okay with the logic being in hardware or non-volatile ROM, but uploading the code to volatile RAM when the hardware starts is a huge problem? I don't follow that logic. Of course it would be better if this was open, but it's much less of a deal than he makes it out to be.
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].
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: microcode you're so right. The Librem 5 phone is expected to be certified as respecting your freedom by FSF, but the Pinephone is not. Both use proprietary firmware, but because the Librem 5 loads the firmware from a chip that can't be updated by the host CPU, then that's apparently okay. Pinephone simply loads it from /lib/firmware
The most idiotic example of their stance with regards to microcode is related to Spectre and Meltdown. They deliberately removed warnings:
"Another significant change in this release is that it was pointed out
that there were error messages in Linux suggesting users to update x86
CPU microcode. Since such microcode is non-Free Software, such messages
don't belong in GNU Linux-libre. We now have patterns to detect and
clean up this sort of message. A number of them were introduced
recently, relying on microcode changes to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown
problems, but there might be others that go farther back. I haven't yet
made my mind on whether to go back, check and possibly respin such
earlier releases."
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.
I disagree. The proposition of source being delivered with any software is indeed unrealistic, but not a bad starting point.
For software that is funded publically these requirements could be realistic for example. Consumers won't demand it of course, but especially when software goes out of maintenance, it would be a huge help to get the source. Unrealistic with copyright protections, but I see the new gang of questionable FSF advocates far more critically.
I didn't downvote you, but I believe your are just wrong here.
"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 wouldn't mind if you did. It was just an observation about the knee-jerk response from someone who clearly hasn't even bothered to read the comment.
> 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.
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.
> simply being able to fix it for myself or our company would absolutely be beneficial.
That's basically the old Unix model, in practice it was unsatisfactory to the point that... people just wrote their own Unix and made a point that fixes should be public - and we got GNU.
Companies could give you the old Unix model tomorrow, if they so wished; but it's effectively lose-lose, because they don't gain anything meaningful (if anything, their support costs are increased by having to deal with thousands of potential user-introduced variations) and you don't gain anything meaningful either - your fix is forgotten the minute you move on and you won't be able to use it with your next employer.
The default today is not the Unix model, it is the Windows model and increasingly the SaaS model. You have none of the 4 freedoms by default.
GP argued that by law by default you should have at least freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that it should not be legal to withhold freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that freedom 0 and 1 should by default actually be facilitated by providing source code. They are arguing for changing the status quo and that doing so gradually is more feasible than all at once.
(Source code is not actually necessary for freedom 1 but it makes it orders of magnitude easier.)
You are arguing that the law is fine because we can just make our own sandbox (GPL software) where we have all 4 freedoms and that is enough. You are arguing that the status quo is fine because you can ignore it while you are in the sandbox.
Turns out the world is a lot bigger than that sandbox.
Your approach towards a world of free software might be to just grow the sandbox until everything else doesn't matter but the GNU GPL family continues to decline in popularity. For this approach you need popularity and for popularity you need effective advocacy and the FSF is not effective.
> They are arguing for changing the status quo and that doing so gradually is more feasible than all at once.
This has been argued over and over and over, and it has made no difference whatsoever. All the limited-rights licenses that have been tried from time to time (MPL et al) have simply fallen by the wayside: because, in reality, nobody is actually interested in this "right to repair" - it was around in the Unix days and it was discarded, because it did not effectively serve users nor businesses.
What have had an impact are effectively two licenses: the MIT/BSD ("do what you want") and GPL ("do what you want but your changes should be public"). By adopting and leveraging those two licenses, the world was slowly steered where we are now - which is a lot better than where we were in the '90s but also where we were in the '70s. We got here by being radical in a punk sense: creating a world of software developed in the open, and fuck what was there before. It's not by bowing to established interests that we ended up with Microsoft developing in the open, it's by bombing their commercial spaces with open software. The minute you stop doing that, they will happily retreat behind the firewall.
> Turns out the world is a lot bigger than that sandbox.
The sandbox is the world at this point, closed software is retreating every day to smaller and smaller niches. You use browsers developed in the open, on websites built with opensource software. Even on mobile, the foundational frameworks are open - the most popular mobile OS is opensource. Obviously it's not a perfect state of things, but it's a world apart from the bad old '90s, and we did get here by keeping the Overton window firmly rooted at one end, thanks in large part to the FSF. It doesn't really matter how much software is GPL, what matters is that other licenses are defined in relation to the GPL.
> The sandbox is the world at this point, closed software is retreating every day to smaller and smaller niches. You use browsers developed in the open, on websites built with opensource software. Even on mobile, the foundational frameworks are open - the most popular mobile OS is opensource. Obviously it's not a perfect state of things, but it's a world apart from the bad old '90s, and we did get here by keeping the Overton window firmly rooted at one end, thanks in large part to the FSF.
The only open source browser with significant usage is Firefox and it is in the single digits. Chromium might be open source but it is not what people use, it's in the other category in statistics. People use Chrome and Edge and Safari and Opera and Vivaldi and none of them are open source. The number of people using AOSP is also vanishingly small. Most Android users use one of the proprietary variants of Android. The year of the Linux desktop never came. The most popular Linux variant after the proprietary Android is the proprietary ChromeOS. And, worst of all, many services that before didn't even involve a computer (ordering food, calling a ride, banking, etc.), now are done through closed source software. It is getting harder and harder to live without proprietary software.
So absolutely not, the sandbox is not the world, the sandbox is getting smaller and smaller in comparison to the world.
The argument was not to no longer hold the Overton window pinned. The argument was to advocate for consumer rights and protections in LAW. Free software advocates are vary much interested in right to repair because right to repair also counters tivo-isation. And the world is much more tivo-ized than it ever was. That the world became so tivo-ized is also a sign of how ineffective the FSF has been at countering a threat they were among the first to draw attention to. You can have all the free software in the world and it is of no use if you can not run it on any hardware.
Firefox is competing with a product of the world’s largest advertising company, I’d tend to assume that, rather than technical merit, is where it fell behind.
X is an interesting case. It was released with a permissive license and the Free Software people argued against it saying that the vendors (Sun, IBM, HP, SGI, etc.) would take it and make a dozen different incompatible versions without sharing any improvements. And that is exactly what happened. The state-of-the-art was arguably held back by a decade because of the permissive license.
I'm thankful to Stallman for his many contributions to the field - (software, legal, moral writings, etc). I am better off for his work, as are most living humans.
However, there's a pretty large number of perfectly reasonable-seeming people who refuse to spend any time interacting with him, either in person or online. His reputation, fairly or otherwise, is terrible.
Maybe that's deserved, maybe it's undeserved - but it's the reputation he has, and that reputation is enough to seriously discourage people from getting involved in the FSF in any capacity.
Stallman is a pillar of our community for better or worse he insisted on the availability of a free c compiler with source code. He is too extreme for my tastes but deserves a base level of respect despite himself.
This has nothing to do with the GPL. For more than two decades Stallman has been described as a terrible public speaker by most people who met him in person. He has many strange quirks and can be very brash. He himself admits being very tone deaf.
I think it probably took an awkward misfit to create the GNU propject and the GPL in the first place. I am reminded of "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (Maxims for Revolutionists by George Bernard Shaw)
He doesnt seem to be liked by some of the more powerful, corporate entities in tech, probably because he pushes some agendas that are somewhat anti-their-profits.
I think this was behind the rather unsuccessful attempts to cancel him a few years ago, which cast a shadow over his reputation.
I heard Stallman speak once about FOSS. He struck me as a very interesting person, but not very flexible in his views. Even if he's 100% "right" in the long run about how digital products should be completely free, his views are so polarizing that it'd be hard to interact with him long enough to understand his positions.
I think there is value in people like Stallman existing. I disagree with him in a lot of regards, but I think it's important for people like him to shift the "Overton Window" of software copyright a bit closer to FOSS. He's a disagreeable bastard, I'm not even sure he would dispute that, but a part of me does respect the dedication to the cause.
That said, I almost always use BSD or MIT licenses for my personal stuff; sometimes I use the Eclipse one because that's the default that Leiningen gives me for Clojure and I can't really be bothered.
Idealism retards the growth of most good ideas. I suffer this daily but it is an internal struggle and I structure my idealism to minimize the impact on others.
> He doesnt seem to be liked by some of the more powerful, corporate entities in tech, probably because he pushes some agendas that are somewhat anti-their-profits
I don't think any of those corporate entities care about Stallman in the slightest.
At least 95% of the time you hear talk about him even in technical forums it's the "why is he still around" sort of controversy in various forms. You almost never hear about him doing something that could be described as positive leadership that could make any competition worry.
I highly doubt anybody at those powerful, corporate entities even keep track of what he's doing, let alone has any concerns for their profits because of him.
> I think this was behind the rather unsuccessful attempts to cancel him a few years ago, which cast a shadow over his reputation.
The attempts to get him out I think come mostly from the Free Software community itself who to a large extent wants a better and less embarrassing leadership.
Can you name a few of these luminaries to see what we've lost?
Most of what I've heard about Stallman are social attacks from autistic mean girls with zero self awareness.
Edit: FYI, people have flagged my follow up comment where I address the request for clarification to make it look like there is none. Just turn on showdead in your HN options to see. This is exactly the kind of playbook they love to use. Manipulative, dishonest and pathetic.
I've met and hung out quite a bit with Stallman (as part of a conference organizers group) in the early 2000s and he wasn't the most self aware person when it came to social situations. He is very socially awkward. Everything I've read so far has seemed plausible, although I would also agree that it seems to be blown out of proportion. He is one of the kindest persons I've met, very idealistic, and a captivating personality. It's just super socially awkward being around him. Sometimes straight up uncomfortable.
I'm not sure tbh (English being my second language), but I guess I would? I mean, we were all very young and very nerdy and thought it was pretty cool to be having dinner with RMS himself. Still, by our nerdy standards, he stood out as being a bit awkward – perhaps partly due to the language and cultural differences (even though he spoke pretty decent Spanish).
> his personal views (which I do not support) and eccentricity
Oh wow. That's some downplaying of the actual issue, which I won't make explicit because it's absolutely disgusting. The guy made himself and his foundation untouchable for anyone with a reputation to lose, leading to a lot of effort going into "de-GNU-ification" of technology stacks.
> Stallman has been a positive force
It's very hard to make this kind of argument for anything he has done in the last 15 years. Two quick points: The version of the GPL that continues to enable the success of Linux is one that Stallman now explicitly disapproves of. And you might have noticed not a single one of the recent successful programming languages uses GCC as the default backend -- there's a whole history of Stallman intervention in the project and resulting idiotic architecture decisions behind why that's the case.
Technical issues were another reason; Stallman intentionally made GCC worse to prevent possible abuse (mostly based on unfounded fears, IMHO), some GNU tools are not well suited for all environments ("bloated", for lack of a better term), and there have been some governance issues (e.g. GNU libc was notorious for a long time, but also copyright assignments to the FSF, bad technical decisions being made for purely ideological reasons).
Also, Apple pretty much proposed to transfer LLVM to the FSF: "If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details."[1] which was basically just ignored. That was in 2005 before GPLv3, but it shows that Apple wasn't against copyleft out of principle and that a small bit of pragmatism would have prevented the alienation of Apple, as well as many other organisations and people. All that for the very small benefit the controversial clauses in GPLv3 give us. Well done people.
>there's a whole history of Stallman intervention in the project and resulting idiotic architecture decisions behind why that's the case.
Could you expand on this?
I still see him in a somewhat positive light because whilst his aspergers makes him not an optimal face to an organization his dogmatism regarding free software and the FSF's efforts in court and elsewhere have proven largely a good thing imo and I don't really fault him for his corporate opponents that stem from that.
Meanwhile a lot of the accusations turned out weirdly fabricated which left me a bit of a bad taste, inconsequential or were regarding statements he'd apologized for and publicly changed his views on with explanation as to why and how.
Stallman can be blamed for the rise of Clang, basically.
He for instance prominently refused to have GCC dump the full AST because of concerns of what people might do with that which could infringe on software freedom:
And that sort of thing suddenly made the non-GPL competition relevant and better.
Now LLVM isn't a tragedy by any means, it's an excellent piece of software. But here we can see Stallman sabotaging his own mission, and resulting in alternatives to GCC being popularized, and written under licenses less favorable to FSF's mission.
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.
Many years ago, I read a comment on Slashdot saying "the fact of a programming language having a "code of conduct" makes it ripe for everlasting drama and politics."
The reason slashdot is no longer relevant as the go-to tech discussion site is just because everyone who loves hating on "modern" things like CoC stayed, and everyone else left. These days it would be more strange to see a major project NOT have a CoC than seeing one. There is drama and politics in any large org whether or not there is a CoC or not.
Slashdot was sold to another media company which had other priorities. Are you aware of its "redesign" drama strictly followed by that same new leadership? Many users left then and there.
I left a long time ago. I think around the same time as CmdrTaco. But the place was basically just tech Luddites and Microsoft bashing so it became a bit repetitive. Also: HN.
Slashdot is a good example how a vastly unpopular redesign to make the site more "modern" can bring the whole business down. It's not even the bad redesign per se; it's sticking to it, and not reversing on it. A real shame in my opinion as I think that auto-moderation system is the best I've seen.
It was ridiculously easy to game the Slashdot moderation system. You knew what topics would get upvoted -- positive about Linux, negative about something like SCO during the lawsuit period. It was not difficult to accumulate karma.
I'm not sure if that was the fault of moderation system. This is more of an echo chamber effect which exists everywhere where there are humans involved. Not sure if technology can change that.
When I read about codes of conduct like this I worry about humnan relations. Does remote work cause the need for CoC? The over prescription of interactions seem like sci-fi to me. I haven’t worked in an office since the last millennium.
No, CoCs became a trend way before covid made remote work possible for the masses. They initially were demanded by project members after high-profile scandals of some kind, usually racist or otherwise discriminatory bullshit, sexual assault on conferences or bullying (Linus Torvalds for example used to be infamous for his language), and then other projects (or their members) wanted ones as well as a preventive measure for the future.
For what it's worth, I dislike CoCs because many of them are written with the assumption that people will behave like utter trash without being explicitly told not to and I grew up with the old "Don't be an asshole" rule [1]... but given what happened in the past where people were clearly incapable of not being assholes and communities having splintered over it, they seem to be inevitable.
I dislike CoCs because they aren't what they claim to be: Instruments to protect people. They are tools of power, ready to be used when needed to bully or oust someone. I therefore really don't understand the broad acceptance or even call for Code of Conducts.
I think this is a reasonable concern. The most recent episode of drama out of Rust is a pretty clear example of problematic behavior by some leadership person, and so it'll be interesting to see whether equally clear consequences will result. In other words, it'll be interesting to see whether their code of conduct is worth the bytes it is stored in.
> Instruments to protect people. They are tools of power, ready to be used when needed to bully or oust someone.
They are both.
A CoC, like other weapons, is more or less value-free. The CoC itself doesn't care what you point it at. It's a question of who is wielding it, and who they're wielding it against.
The problem is most people will in fact not be assholes, but the ones who have a disproportionate effect, because there's no direct penalty. Someone can't stand in your yard and loudly shout personal abuse for very long without getting hauled away by the police*, but there's no such enforcement mechanism online.
[*] yes, it can be more complicated than this. you get my meaning.
> The reason slashdot is no longer relevant as the go-to tech discussion site is just because everyone who loves hating on "modern" things like CoC stayed, and everyone else left.
That was certainly not my experience; I left because all discussions were monopolised by a few seemingly unemployed accounts to shame any and everyone into agreeing with whatever the vocal minority at the time was pushing.
When I stopped reading it, the only people left were those who were constantly using shaming language on anyone who didn't agree about things like a code of conduct, or words are violence too, etc.
The fascist part of it is forcing people to use them and threatening them when they don't understand the need to address a non-problem with terminology, duties, and responsibilities they don't agree with.
You can find no trace of childish bickering in the language, tools, libraries, or documentation. I'm not sure why people doing silly things off in the distance would bias you against using Rust, the use of which would not involve those people ever.
While I think your statement is true, a few reasons:
1 - I will inevitably end up on some mailing list or forums when researching libraries, correct way to do things, etc, where such people interact.
2 - As 'governors' of the language, how can I trust them to make sound investments in the future? I don't want to just learn a language and tooling as a one off.
3 - I don't want to support organizations that act this way, even if the language were perfect.
1) This is an accurate complaint. By my estimation (on the official discord) they interact in such a way for an amortized three of the 1440 minutes in the day.
2) The language is pretty great. Further serious investment is going to be primarily in the third-party libraries department.
3) You need make no contributions, financial or otherwise. I am probably a net drain on the foundation's resources.
> I don't use Rust, but the constant childish bickering has turned me away from even caring to.
Same. I want to use it because technically it's the right choice for a few projects, but when I talk to people in my organization I still label it as "too immature and volatile to adopt today, but worth watching". I was hoping the adoption by Linux and Microsoft would be the forcing factor to stabilize it, but the governance aspect still seems chaotic. I'll keep watching and hopefully it calms down such that adopting it won't be a risk. Or maybe the good parts will just get adopted by a more stable (w.r.t. governance and standardization) language.
Rust is pretty stable and clearly past the point of being immature and volatile. A few issues that the internet has blown up lately doesn't change that.
This, I think, captures the problem quite well; "please don't do this, all it does is create drama!"
Maybe so, but the best way to end up with well-intentioned people absolutely hating each other is to never allow the airing of grievances.
I'm hugely in favour of kind, empathic, and thoughtful communication, and I don't like the "people yelling at each other"-type of projects to the point I simply don't participate. But part of that is also accepting that sometimes people express themselves in less-than-ideal ways, and allowing for the fact that sometimes conflicts happen, and that some amount of yelling and drama is necessarily for a healthy community (or indeed, most relationships between people) because we're all flawed and emotional beings. Rust took a good idea and pushed it to the extreme, which rarely works out well.
Seems to have worked well enough for OpenBSD, OpenOffice (and then LibreOffice from that), Jenkins, OpenSSH, Apache Server, WordPress, Inkscape, Webkit and Xorg.
When did Java get forked? The closest case I can think of is the Oracle/Google lawsuit, which 1. Oracle lost, and 2. wouldn't have even been a thing if Google had forked rather than reimplementing.
I don't see how one could describe this as immature. Immature would seem to be just complaining endlessly, memeing, or otherwise being immature. Instead, they're unhappy with the direction of Mozilla/Rust, and found a perfectly good solution to the problem. That's awesome. This seems like one of the many benefits of truly open source software. You can fork not only to change code, but also culture.
Its actually not. The most recent drama was caused by the Rust Project, not the Rust Foundation, which are two completely separate entities. This seems to be a common misunderstanding which is being spread around here, including the top comment to this post.
The ongoing drama emerging from the leadership / foundation causes real damage to the language. I'm not sure if I like this move of forking Rust, but something has to change. And the change must be as visible as the drama to help Rust regain the lost reputation.
One good thing about these pointless forks is, they help reduce the number of people who are in it for the drama and get emotionally turbulent for every disagreement. Eventually people who actually care for the language and invested in its long term success remain. I wish the crab people well and hope they never decide to come back to Rust.
PS: Can't help but chuckle reading people's comments on wanting to either abandon Rust or not try it. Used to be that languages were picked based on use case/fit. Then it turned to hype cycle. And now it's going to be based on people drama ?
It has exactly zero technical advantages over the original. It has not even the plan to add any improvements over the original… The plan is just to merge upstream.
It has no funding. (And a project of this sized needs a lot of funding, just to get the day to day maintenance going.)
This whole thing is completely pointless. I'm wondering why it gets so much attention.
> It has exactly zero technical advantages over the original. It has not even the plan to add any improvements over the original… The plan is just to merge upstream.
Technical advantage is not the goal. Here is the actual reason they forked: https://crablang.org/
The Crab (or “CrabLang”) community fork was created as a lighthearted yet measured response to the growing concerns within the community about the influence of corporations and the restrictive trademark policy proposed by the foundation
Rust has been rather monolithic. There is no such thing as a rust spec, just whatever the rust compiler does. This is a good first step to making it into a language people work in rather than just blog about.
A code-identical fork with a different name for trademark reasons is not going to make the Rust team write a spec. Look to the GCC Rust implementation for that.
Also, people already do work in Rust. It's in the Linux kernel right now.
Compiler behavior is the only thing that matters in any language, as per Hyrum's law. A spec is a useful tool for discussing and building a language, but don't confuse the map for the territory.
Nice. I like this. The Rust core team/foundation/project/whatever nonsense needs to get its shit together. Their actions are starting to kill the project.
For those who are just confused about the whole situation (like I was), there's an video explaining the issue that lead the fork happening; https://youtu.be/gutR_LNoZw0
It doesn't matter if this will eventually be a "real" fork or not, I don't see that as a meaningful criticism. However, a fork + thousands of stars is one of the more unique ways of a grass roots protest.
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?
No. It's just people doing what they want with OSS. The majority of the mindshare is still in one place. It looks more like a protest and or a hobby project then anything else.
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?
More of a Rust dabbler/observer at this point, but one thing I've never been a fan of is the actual name. It is neither pretentious or anti-pretentious.
The forker missed an opportunity to at least improve that, instead choosing a name that probably mostly subliminally enforces their dissatisfaction with Rust governance itself. Might as well have called it SheldonsSpot or OffMyLawn. I would have riffed the rust thing: Oxide or something similar.
Other than the title seeming to imply Crablang is now the canonical language, I see no problem with this as a casual observer.
They say they want to keep the fork in sync with "upstream", so they aren't trying to split the community away from Rustlang, but to have an alternative administrative structure.
Alright! That's always been a core feature of open source.
There are five posts in the past 47 days that desperately try to draw attention to the fact that Rust has a community fork now called Crab. The last four accumulated almost no activity, but this one suddenly made it.
At least with Go you can use "Golang" in search and get reasonable results. With Rust, I often have to write "rust programming language + [what im searching for]" which is really annoying. Not sure if anyone ever dubs Rust to "Rustlang".
I wish the crablang people would make it a lot more clear how to contribute to crablang itself. Were I to make any future bugfixes etc. I'd prefer to submit them to crablang rather than deal with the other folks. As it's open source folks would be free to "upstream" should they so desire.
Unfortunately you can't have something be both a long-term fork and also accept contributions, so the crablang people need to decide and then publicize that decision.
I looked in the github repo, and it seems the collective effort of all the 400+ commenters here is more effort than the authors gave to this “language”.
Someone just forked a repo and put on some “statements”. Okay. There is no real effort behind this.
Continually stating that they aren't 'at odds' with the Rust project. But, surely they are if they're creating an entirely separate fork? I have no skin in the Rust game, so have no opinion, but that strikes me as odd
Honestly this bomb was waiting to burst for a long time now. Rust has aligned politically instead of just being a cool language. Bringing politics into something unrelated which brings people together is always a recipe for disaster.
But… the people who made it brought the politics. They own it. Rust is also not a cool language. You can not be cool and fuss about soundness and memory safety at the same time. It is mutually exclusive.
I'm struggling to decide whether this comment is a troll comment or not. But I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
> But… the people who made it brought the politics. They own it.
They don't. At the very least not fully. The compiler itself is MIT/Apache licensed. This gives up a lot of control and I think many people, including me, would say that means they don't own it anymore.
> Rust is also not a cool language. You can not be cool and fuss about soundness and memory safety at the same time. It is mutually exclusifve.
Whether the people who implement Rust and/or write Rust are cool has nothing to do whether the language itself is cool. I also fail to grasp why caring about memory safety and soundness and being cool is considered mutually exclusive. Why would it be?
But the reasons for this one are laughable. Formalising a trademark policy and a guy getting demoted to regular speaker insetad of keynote speaker? Seriously? People are screaming fascism over this?
I don't particularly care about Rust but one of the reasons I've hesitated to learn / use it was because the project seemed like it was led by woke people that pushed politics into the programming space which imo is completely unnecessary.
One thing I've learned by experience is that people who push their political agenda into everything is inherently toxic and will destroy everything they come in contact with.
There is no need for a Code of Conduct like so many programming projects have today, there is no need to have a "Black lives matter" banner on the framework website nor is there any need of supporting any other political cause unless it directly affects the project or the maintainers. If you start advocating for cause x there will always be people who rightfully will argue for cause y.
I'm sick and tired of general politics getting pushed into everything.
Politics is everywhere and everything. There is no chance of "keeping politics out of" anything. Making such a decision or rule is highly political too. This goes for sports, entertainment, culture, tech, open source..
The fact that there are "counterexamples" of successful projects that "thrive without involving politics and never had a CoC" isn't an argument to the contrary.
I get that there will be politics enough to go around and honestly I only think it strenghten my point. There is no need to bring in external politics since there is enough in the technical space alone.
I mean external politics, not "office politics". There is no meaningful way of separating any group of people working together (a company, an OSS project, whatever) and politics.
I understood that, I just think your arguments are bad.
> There is no chance of "keeping politics out of" anything. Making such a decision or rule is highly political too.
Of course there is and such a decision is not about general politics or highly political. It's a bit like saying forbidding smoking on school grounds will never make it go away so we should just let the kids smoke. In fact, I would argue that Rust already has a lot of political rules in the code of conduct.
Even if people will break the rules there is still value in creating such rules but that will obviously only work as long as the people making the rules also abide by them which is not the case in the Rust community (among many others). It's obvious that certain political views are prohibited while others are welcome.
I guess what I am disappointed in is the constant double standards. They can have "black lives matters" on their webpage but if I were to link to a anti-trans movement (just making an example) on their discord it wouldn't take long until I'm banned. Anti trans movements and black lives matter has nothing to do with most development projects, thus none should be pushed on their websites.
Sure, but just because the $FOO software project is happy to incorporate political views on User Freedoms vs Developer Freedoms, it doesn't mean that proselytsing some particular political candidate is welcome.
IOW, when people reject a particular political topic, you can't very well turn around and say "How dare you; you talk about free software, and that's political too!"
A community willing to engage in one political activity doesn't automagically open the door for every vocal minotiry to spam them until they cave.
Academic papers are usually written by a small group. But I imagine for large collaborations like papers from LHC and similar you'd have to deal with some of the same issues any major org. It comes at you very quickly. Can you hold an important meeting on the day 2 people of 100 are away because it's a religious holiday? What do you do about the fact that the Ukrainian guy refuses to work until the Russian guy is kicked out of the team?
And the research itself is of course interfacing with politics all the time whether they like it or not. Of course more in climate research or economics than in theoretical physics but it's still there.
I also find myself frequently questioning the labeling of things one doesn't like as "political".
Having a code of conduct that focuses on treating people w/ respect and discouraging personal attacks is not political, and it's strange to me that someone would label it as such.
That's an interesting way of framing a position: "I think X and all the obvious counter-examples that might prove me wrong are irrelevant.", "Why are they irrelevant?", "Because I just said they are!".
Anyway, you're equivocating around the meaning of "politics". Yes, everything involving people is political in some sense. But that isn't the sense people here are talking about.
I just preempted the usual answer "look at X, they don't have a lot of politics and they seem to be doing OK" because it's such an obvious non-argument that it shouldn't even need explaining.
> the project seemed like it was led by woke people that pushed politics into the programming space which imo is completely unnecessary
You’re not wrong, to a degree, but avoiding the language because of this is exactly the wrong take. Instead, if more people use it these sentiments are diluted and approach the median. IMO by even caring about this at all in your language decisions, you’re engaging in the exact same kind of game as those people are.
> IMO by even caring about this at all in your language decisions, you’re engaging in the exact same kind of game as those people are
Well, that is becaused I feel forced into it. I wouldn't care about the maintainers political views unless they pushed it down my throat at every opportunity they get.
I feel it is a sound economical choice not to support orgs and people who are toxic or actively work against you and your interests. I vote with my wallet when it comes to products and services but when it comes to languages I vote with my time and knowledge. I choose another programming language instead, it's not like there isn't any options out there.
What if I would have picked Rust? Then I would have to get a new domain for my website, I would feel unwelcome in the community because I don't share their political opinions and likely other things that is yet to come. Nah, I'd rather go with people and projects that don't do this kind of crap which I don't have time for honestly.
Honestly how much does their political stance affect your work?
Using a programming language is 99.9% technical work. As long as they don't go out of their way e.g. to make rustc compile your project wrong if you have files with political content with opposing orientation on your computer, how does any of that matter?
It shouldn’t be a problem if you just use the language. It does become something you should be mindful of if you want to get more involved, e.g. contribute to core, maintain high profile libraries, give talks at conferences, etc.
As a team member of another high profile project, I have had the pleasure of being accused (thankfully privately) of being intolerant towards trans people because I was very vocal about a change breaking backwards compatibility. Apparently the person behind the change is trans; I only learned about that when I was accused. A decade into woke politics I still have no idea why I should give a single shit about which bathroom they go in or who they choose to sleep with or whatever. But some people won’t hesitate to weaponize this crap when given the chance, and disappointingly, they can often amass a big cheering crowd, or should I say lynching mob.
> Honestly how much does their political stance affect your work?
Since I do not use Rust, not at all. But if I were this policy would affect me. For example, I had a domain with "rust" in it. I let it expire, since I decided not to use Rust which now seems like a great choice. I am also soon going to be a gun owner. Also, if I were to use Rust I would probably join a user group now required to adopt their CoC and a bunch of other things.
The main issue with people pusing politics in programming is a sign of a possibly unstable project since in my experience and by looking at the trademark policy it appears it was completely right. Restricting speech and adding a gun policy is just wtf. It is a clear indication that the project is run by people that have very specific political agendas that they're trying to push onto a programming project that has nothing to do with them.
There's plenty of precedent that states forks die, however to describe it as entirely futile is:
A) Not exactly constructive.
B) Possibly untrue.
The move might indeed die, if the rust foundations leadership gets it's act together. Which is a strong push for them to sort things out rather than assuming everything will be fine with their current heavy handed and opaque approach.
Failing this, we could be in a situation with another Rocky linux, FlatCar linux or LibreOffice ;)
In the examples you gave, either the original project shifted course significantly, or there are major technical disagreements. Here, pointless trademark drama is all there is, and the fork AFAICT replaced some strings and nothing else.
Not sure what you are trying to convey. There are a ton of IRC hosts out there and they are all interchangeable.
A real language fork is not interchangeable, even a different implementation of the same language is going to have its subtle compatibility problems. People pay the price for tangible benefits like performance or portability. You don’t need to use a fork and pay the technical price for it if the only benefit is that Rust Foundation hypothetically won’t sue you for using the word “rust”; just frigging use “crab” as the moniker for “rust”.
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.
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 indefinite ongoing burden until one dies. Not to mention the trademark bullshit affects a tiny slice of the user base at best.
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.
It worked for io.js when they split off from node.js. When io.js was re-merged in with node, the project was all the better for it. They ultimately improved Node's release schedule and cadence, governance, etc.
An issue with this analogy is that io.js addressed major problems that the community was aligned with. That isn't the case with this repo, which is just a replacement of the word 'rust' with 'crab'.
You are implying that the only measure of success for a fork is for it to exist indefinitely. If the goal of io.js was to improve Node's governance model, which appears to be the case, then I would consider it a success.
Everyone who is using node.js is using it... Anyway you and I have a different idea of what it means to die. The identifier io.js is no longer in use. But everything that it actually is, is now node.js.
With OpenOffice all the large contributors (IBM, RedHat, etc.) moved to LibreOffice. Only Oracle remained with OpenOffice. So unless CloudFlare, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. decide to move to the Rust fork these situations are not at all comparable.
> Technically, both receive regular updates. But, OpenOffice is limited to bug fixes and minor updates.
> LibreOffice has more development activity, frequent bug fixes/minor updates, regular major upgrades with newer features, and improved user experience.
Apache can do whatever they want here, but the project is limping at best.
So you went to github and saw commits made 3 days ago, then concluded that surely that means the project isn't dead. It is though, you're just completely missing the forest for the trees - a typical trait of programmer types.
If that were a project that needs to change as much as a full office suite, then yeah. It's not so much the absolute numbers as much as the relative numbers when compared with the amount of activity in Libreoffice.
I really like reading/writing Rust, but stay away from the community. Highest drama mainstream lang community ever but they've created a pretty good ecosystem.
Except for the actix fiasco, it's generally been quite chill as a user. You float above the twisting nether and grab what it throws out, which is pretty good.
It's so that people can "use it while retaining the ability to create content and promote its name, logo, and other assets however we please, without the limitations imposed by a trademark policy".
Rust is experiencing growing pains because they're still figuring out a governance structure that works for everyone. They want to simultaneously keep the current structure of bottom up development where each team (compiler, lang, crates.io, cargo) has the autonomy to make decisions for themselves, but the project as a whole can speak can come to a consensus and speak with a single voice. That's what this RFC tries to capture (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfc-leadership-council/blob/mai...). But the project isn't there yet, and is making these frustrating missteps in the interim. The lack of transparency into these missteps manifests as "bureaucracy" to outsiders like us.
If Crab lang actually attracted people doing the real work of development, they would have the exact same "bureaucracy" as teams tried to figure out how to build consensus and speak with one voice. The fact that they don't have bureaucracy is a direct consequence of them not doing any work right now. None of the crab lang people are involved in actually building Rust, as far as I can tell, so they might not be aware of this.
Lastly, I want to note that the top comment in this thread is blaming the Foundation, which is simply bizarre. The Foundation very explicitly tries to stay hands off on technical decisions and does not interfere in how the teams organise themselves. You may disagree with that decision, but it's an inaccurate characterisation to blame them.