Not let them have the foundation chair. I think Ashley would've made a great chairwoman, but she just might not have wanted to become chairwoman of the foundation.
> she just might not have wanted to become chairwoman of the foundation.
I can assure you she would have been happy to continue to be the executive director.
I talked about this briefly in the thread, but wasn't quite clear enough, so might as well also elaborate here, since it was brought up. I am not worried that she will not be the next ED. I mean, I would have preferred it, but it's not my decision to make. The structural issue here is that the foundation decided to forgo extending her contract while looking for a new ED; this means that the foundation currently does not have one, and we don't know when a new one is coming. During that time, the chair of the board has more power than they usually would, and Amazon is chair of the board.
I don't want Amazon to define Rust but I want my pal to define it doesn't exactly sound like a solid argument. Is there any more meat on the bone here?
I did not say "I want my pal to define it" at all. My main thrust here is that no one organization, let alone one person, gets to define what Rust is. And that we have a situation where one organization is gaining a significant amount of power very quickly, and using that to gain even more power.
Ashley has been really great for the Rust community, isn't currently employed by a massive corporation, and has some really solid views & principles on how to empower open source work. (See some of her talks) Empowering open source work on Rust is exactly what the Rust foundation is supposed to do, which is why I'd really have preferred a Rust foundation with Ashley as ED.
An unfortunate blemish on her record is her handling of `wasm-pack`.
She worked to ensure it become a critical part of the Rust/Wasm ecosystem and then silently stopped maintaining it. For most of 2020 / 2021 `wasm-pack` was not updated with pull requests and security fixes because Ashley did not transfer publish rights.
Even though `wasm-pack` became unusable for many users it was still described as necessary in the official Rust / Wasm tutorials. Likely this set back the Rust/Wasm ecosystem by discouraging many new members.
It would have been far better if she just spoke up and asked for help.
It seems she wanted to ignore a problem she didn't want to deal with, which I can relate to, but that's not a good quality in an executive director.
> For most of 2020 / 2021 `wasm-pack` was not updated with pull requests and security fixes because Ashley did not transfer publish rights.
There is an easy and appropriate response to this - just fork() the project under a new name. There's nothing wrong with this, especially when the maintainer doesn't respond to community inquiries. People in the open source community are generally volunteers, so we shouldn't expect or require them to "speak up" if it can be avoided.
I think there are a couple important details you are missing...
First, wasm-pack is not Ashley's personal project, it is an official Rust Wasm project. That means it is owned by the Rust Wasm team, and it is maintained by the Rust Wasm team. It is an official part of Rust, similar to how cargo and rustdoc are an official part of Rust. wasm-pack was never intended to be maintained only by Ashley.
Multiple Rust Wasm Core team members (including myself) politely asked Ashley multiple times to transfer publishing rights to the Rust Wasm Core team (which she was supposed to have done months ago), but she refused.
Multiple people had politely offered to take over maintenance of wasm-pack (when it was clear that Ashley was unwilling to do so), but once again she refused. She knew how important wasm-pack is to Rust Wasm, but she did not want to give up control and power, even though it wasn't even supposed to be her package in the first place.
Second, forking is not as simple or as easy as you claim... forking is something that has a very high cost, so it should be done as a last resort. wasm-pack is an official Rust package (and it is vital to Rust Wasm), and so forking it would have a lot of costs:
* A new crate would have to be created (what should it be called? wasm-pack2?)
* The GitHub repo would have to be changed or transferred.
* Multiple different documentation websites (including the official Rust website) would need to be updated.
* A newsletter would need to be sent out informing everybody of the change.
* All existing projects would need to switch to the new package.
* The old package would still exist, which would be very confusing for people, especially because many tutorials and blogs would still be referring to the old wasm-pack!
* Ashley herself would throw a huge tantrum over it, because she would view it as taking control away from herself. And because she is a Rust Core team member, her tantrum would have power behind it.
Forking is absolutely NOT an appropriate solution in this case. Ashley's behavior was simply wrong, unacceptable, and reflects very poorly on the Rust team (which she is a part of).
As for Ashley's personal character... before she worked for Rust, she worked for npm. While she was working there, she tried to falsely accuse Rod Vagg because she wanted to kick him out of npm. Thankfully she failed, and after she failed she quit npm:
While she was working for npm, she violated npm's Code of Conduct numerous times, saying incredibly horrible sexist and racist things such as "kill all men", and actively trying to prevent white men from speaking at tech conferences:
No, she was not joking, and even if it was "just a joke" it is unacceptable. If a man said "kill all women" even as a joke he would be immediately fired and blacklisted from all companies.
Despite all of this, she was still hired onto the Rust Core team, because she is in a romantic relationship with Steve Klabnik (nepotism). Interestingly, Steve Klabnik is also the same person who is smearing Amazon because Amazon denied a job to Ashley.
The Rust Core team was aware of Ashley's past behavior, yet they hired her anyways. And even though numerous people spoke out about this, they were silenced and censored by the Rust team:
That’s a ridiculous interpretation of what was said.
“There are 2 entities which make decisions...the contract for the person holding the post of 1 of those 2 entities was not extended by the other entity, and the other entity has not given any timeline on when they expect to fulfill that position, therefore leading to a situation where it’s the only entity with power” is not “I want it run by my pal”.
Hey Steve! Forgive me if you already have touched on this, let me know and I can do more digging myself, but upon expiration of Ashley's contract as ED, you said it was the foundation that decided to not extend her contract. Would that have be the group decision including each member director or solely the chairwoman's?
I am not an expert in the foundation's bylaws, and the only thing they said publicly is "The Rust Foundation Board of Directors also wishes the best to Ashley Williams, who will be leaving the post of interim executive director "[1].
I expect that it was a group decision and not a sole one. But again, my point is not about how that happened, my point is that it has happened, and what that means for the state of the organization as a whole, that is, that leadership is concentrated in a single organization.
This would likely have been easier to know if the foundation had been releasing the minutes from the meetings, the last set of minutes released at the moment is from May
JFC, that's what you're dog whistling about?! That Ashley "all men are bad and I won't apologize" Williams got fired? Good riddance, and you can go with her.
Many people think that the best thing for projects like this is to have as many entities involved as possible. Anything that is controlled by single entity is bound to forget the needs of others.
For example: neither Mozilla nor Amazon might have Embedded Systems as a core interest, so they will forget about it and might accidently make decisions that ate bad for this use cases. If you also have ARM, Microcontroller vendors and so on on board, they will make sure that this topic isn't overlooked.
>> Anything that is controlled by single entity is bound to forget the needs of others.
That is perhaps the biggest concern.
When a large tech company controls governance, their needs and priorities come first.
We have seen similar concerns with other programming languages in the past: Java (Sun / Oracle), Go (Google), Swift (Apple).
Exclusive or dominant control is not necessarily bad (depends on how transparently the governance process runs and who is involved), but it can severely limit the programming language community's effect and leave the needs of some groups unfulfilled.
FOSS Projects should fight to maintain a healthy independence from corporate influence. That perfect balance ism difficult to define, much less maintain.
Having a single company mostly control an Open Source project means that if the company decides to drop the project, stop funding it, and/or move devs from working on it to work on something else, progress halts and it's difficult to get things back. That's why so many projects try to have Foundation that controls resources and can be financially backed, etc.
There's also the "if the company goes evil the project may also be affected", like Red Hat pulling the carpet under CentOS or many other examples.
The solution isn't "Well - let's stop that company from using our product" it's to ride that company for a while and try to remain semi-independent until the spotlight shown on your product by that company attracts other devs. Basically the "Oh hey - Amazon decided to use Rust? Maybe it isn't just a passing fad..." adoption takes time and Rust is still very young.
But... doesn't Rust have a Foundation that controls resources and can be financially backed? It seems like now you are saying that employees of large corporations also should not have serious roles in such Foundations.
I agree with the points in your comment, but one can also acknowledge that the popularity of some programming languages is buoyed by corporate sponsorship or the association with a company. Would Rust or Go have enjoyed their popularity without the support of Mozilla and Google?
Also, without a generous benefactor, open source languages have to scrape funding together piecemeal from different sources. For example, both Rust and Go have had (or still have) dedicated staff writing documentation for the language. This is a luxury that other languages (e.g. Nim or Crystal) cannot fund or afford.
All languages want to attract developers and a key question is: how can languages without a big corporate benefactor attract funding to help grow the language and build related libraries?
Having a single company with most the control is not necessarily the same as having a corporate sponsorship. A language could have many corporate sponsorships and benefactors. The problem being referenced is having one benefactor with too much control.
That problem is fundamental. As soon as one entity gets too much control, it's impossible to wrest control back without their agreement, or a long protracted battle which will hurt the thing being fought over.
Nobody is saying keep corporate interests completely divorced, this is just a call to be aware that one interest is getting too much power, whether on purpose or just through increased interest on their part, but the end result is the same. If we care about Rust not being beholden to one entity at the expense of others, then action should be taken now (even if that action is just much increased scrutiny and asking Amazon to please make sure the executive directory position is filled ASAP, and not with someone Amazon affiliated).
There was a lot of good and a lot of bad! It was absolutely necessary to get Rust going. But even as the project started, senior leadership at Mozilla wanted to make sure that it was a community thing, not a Mozilla specific thing.
Even though Mozilla was pretty hands-off from Rust, management wise, one thing being in control of something like this just has a lot of effects. I'm not really prepared to go into a full retro of Mozilla's involvement with Rust here, I just wanted to note that there was also a lot of good there.
Ohhhhhhh, this explains a lot of the "Rust is the next great thing" I keep seeing around. Amazon has taken a page out of Microsoft's 90s playbook of embracing stuff and astroturfing their extensions until they claim it as their own and extinguish competition.
I hope the Rust team finds a way out, but I suspect now that if Amazon has their hooks in it then they'll just fork it.
Given how many of the personal attacks on Steve are saying almost the same thing, I don't know that it's "at least five". It might be just one person with multiple accounts. If it's more than one, they're all following the same idea of what message they should be using to smear Steve...
I'm sure it was. But it's six years on, and companies have gotten involved. They now have a financial stake. It would be naive to think that evangelism is still genuine grass roots, in the same way that it's naive to think the stuff on your FB feed reflects what your friends find interesting and worth sharing.
Still don't know why we should let these big tech companies have board seats on programming language foundations for them to have the power to do this.
I feared this would happen months ago when Facebook joined the board and even talked to steve about my concerns [0] [1].
> Still don't know why we should let these big tech companies have board seats on foundations for them to do this.
for them to do what?
> I feared this would happen months ago
feared what would happen?
> Unfortunately it has come true with no surprise.
what has come true?
In this post and the first thread you linked, you're doing the same thing – raising concerns without saying what those concerns are. They might be valid concerns, but if you only allude to them without ever stating them, nobody will know!
So you've admitted you haven't read what I said and the tweets and you've just rushed into the comments section?
> I don't understand why Google, Microsoft and AWS et. al are on a board of this new foundation.
> It is the structure that I am concerned about. Again, I'd rather have them just sponsor Rust, why wasn't a gold or platinum sponsorship like structure considered without placing them on the board of directors.
> We shouldn't be giving corporations too much power by letting them buy board seats in a foundation to steer the language, in this case Rust.
Are you saying I didn't state these concerns?
And even steve is concerned about the structure himself, if you have bothered to read the tweets.
Maybe you should actually read my comment and the links before replying.
What "concerns"? Again you have stated and quoted nothing other than vague "it's the structure" or allusions to "too much power". What about the structure? What power are you alluding to?
What are your concerns, exactly? Do you even have any, or are you just being dramatic about "big company bad"?
> What are your concerns, exactly? Do you even have any, or are you just being dramatic about "big company bad"?
Where did I say "big company bad"?, I'm not against them sponsoring a project, they shouldn't get the opportunity to buy a board seat, which is what Rust's structure allows. Hence why, it's appearing that Rust isn't being led by the community.
Before you continue to gaslight me again, you can have companies (big ones) that sponsor a project/foundation and not be given a board seat.
The problem is that other people are making vague claims, without actually substantiating them.
If someone makes vague claims like that, they deserve to be dismissed. It is on you to state your concerns clearly, not on other people to read between the lines.
> If most people are unable to understand you or your arguments, that is the fault of the communicator, for being so bad at communicating.
Sure. But is this really about "most people" -- or just a (very) vocal minority that doesn't (want to) understand? It's not like there are thousands of people asking for clarification; I make it three, including you.
I'm just saying that at least to me,
>>> Still don't know why we should let these big tech companies have board seats on programming language foundations for them to have the power to do this. [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513316 ]
and, at the latest,
>>> they shouldn't get the opportunity to buy a board seat, which is what Rust's structure allows. Hence why, it's appearing that Rust isn't being led by the community. [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514247 ]
felt perfectly clear. That's yanonninator's [sp?] whole beef, right there (twice over), AFAICS. What's not to understand about that?
Whats not to understand is the moral punchline of any of this, which is left completely unjustified, and is merely implied, without any reasons given.
Don't just say "They have a board seat". Instead say "They have a board seat, and are using that board seat for bad things X,Y, and Z, which have negative consequences A, B, and C".
Do you see how the corrected statement, actually gives people something to engage with, instead of someone merely asserting the amoral, unopinionated fact of "They have a board seat"?
If you actually make an argument, then other people can judge if they agree that things X, Y, and Z are bad, or they can judge if they agree or disagree with the consequences of A,B, and C.
But, when someone just says "They have a board seat", they are making a unopinionated factual statement, as opposed to actually justifying what the tweets intend to imply, which is that them having a board seat is bad for certain reasons which are unstated.
Unfortunately, though, I expect the reasons as for why the moral arguments are unstated, is because the person doesn't actually have any moral arguments. Instead, they likely just want to imply that certain things are wrong, without actually having to defend or give reasons as for why the things are at all bad.
> Do you see how the corrected statement, actually gives people something to engage with, instead of someone merely asserting the amoral, unopinionated fact of "They have a board seat"?
Yes and no:
Yes, I understand that to some people, obviously including you, "They have [bought] a board seat" is an "amoral, unopinionated fact".
But no, that's not "instead of merely". Looks to me like the problem is that you don't see that to many people, "They have [bought] a board seat" is not just an "amoral, unopinionated fact" but in itself already a moral punchline to engage with. There is no need for any tweets to "intend to imply" anything. Whether any non-beneficial consequences have followed or are immediately to expect is, in their view, irrelevant: That's just not how shit is supposed to work, i.e. wrong in itself.
And frankly, it's a bit baffling to me how you and those who argue like you seem to have such a hard time understanding this view. I mean, it's one thing not to agree with it, but you're all coming off as if it hasn't even occurred to you that it's possible to see things that way. Makes me wonder if you're seriously so blind, or if it's some underhanded debating tactic. Whichever it is, in my eyes it seriously weakens your argument.
> to have such a hard time understanding this view.
If I were a fiction writer, I could write a dozen different reasons as for what the problem is. But the issue is, that although I could definitely make up reasons, in my fiction book, as for why this is an issue, it tells me nothing about how this actually applies to the Rust community.
If you actually make the argument yourself, then it allows people to understand if there are specific issues, that are more or less bad, based on the informed opinion of someone directly from the community, instead of our uninformed, guesses, that might be right, or wrong, or slightly wrong.
For example, maybe the problem is similar to what Microsoft used to do. Maybe it isn't. Maybe Amazon is doing something that is bad, in a separate and different way, than what Microsoft did decades ago.
But if you don't actually make the argument, then other people cannot tell if the issue is bad, in a similar way as to how other past issues were, or if it is bad in a different way, than how the microsoft situation was bad.
Thats why it is better if people actually make the argument. Because although, yes, I could write a fiction book, or a script for a movie, to describe why these hypothetical issues are bad, I might get it completely wrong, and that the actual thing is bad in a different way, because of something specific to the rust community.
> if it hasn't even occurred to you that it's possible to see things that way.
The problem is that I can imagine a dozen different possible ways to "see things that way", which might be completely off the mark, or exactly correct of the reality of the situation.
I can imagine multiple different universes, where my guess would be right, or wrong, and I don't actually know which universe I am in, unless the informed party actually makes the argument, all the way through.
So I can both imagine arguments, as well as imagine how those guesses could be wrong, and why maybe the situation is wrong in a different way, than my first X number of guesses.
Thats why it is so much better if the person actually makes the argument, all the way through.
> Whether any non-beneficial consequences have followed or are immediately to expect is, in their view, irrelevant
Hey, if they had specifically said the following "I concede that there are no other negative effects at all, and that amazon hasn't done anything bad, and I have no other arguments, beyond them having a board seat is bad, in and of itself, with no other justification", then that would be an actual understandable, and straight forward argument!
But they might have made different arguments. If it literally is that they have absolutely no other arguments, beyond "Them having a board seat is bad, and there are no other bad consequences", then it would be nice if they explicitly said that.
> > to have such a hard time understanding this view.
> If I were a fiction writer, I could write a dozen different reasons as for what the problem is. But the issue is, that although I could definitely make up reasons, in my fiction book, as for why this is an issue, it tells me nothing about how this actually applies to the Rust community.
You're still not getting it: It's NOT A MATTER OF "applies". It's a question of principle.
> If you actually make the argument yourself, then it allows people to understand if there are specific issues, that are more or less bad, based on the informed opinion of someone directly from the community, instead of our uninformed, guesses, that might be right, or wrong, or slightly wrong.
He already made his argument in full. It's just that you're refusing to acknowledge that it is an argument.
So, thank you, I think I'm done here: I'm obviously unable to convey to you what you're not getting, and I don't think you need to go any more rounds of the same -- I trust it's clear enough to everyone else by now that this is due to your stubborn refusal.
> It's NOT A MATTER OF "applies". It's a question of principle.
Principles could apply to a given community in different ways. One principle in one context, could be more important than others. Thus, the person explaining their position out, even further, is useful.
For example, the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", is very important for law, because it involves locking people up.
But it is likely much less important, for determining if your friend lied to you about why they didn't want to go to dinner yesterday. The only consequence of this, is maybe you'll be a little bit annoyed at your friend.
Or take the principle of "free speech", which people talk about as a principle, and not just a law, all the time. Free speech is a principle, but it is still more important when it relates to the government, than to private individuals and what individuals allow to be said in their houses.
Thats why bringing up the principle, as it relates to the rust community, is important for a knowledgeable person to do.
> He already made his argument in full.
If someone is making, this pretty.... shall we say... specific argument which is straight up "There are no negative consequences at all to this, but I don't care", it is important to be more clear about it.
The reason, is because that is an opinion, that many people would normally only accuse someone of having, as a straight up attack. As in, People attack someone, by claiming that this is their position.
And because someone in good faith, might not want to attack someone, unjustly, it is important for the person making the original argument, to be even more clear, than normal.
I would be extremely hesitant to accuse someone of holding that position, unless they say, multiple times, that they simply do not care about any negative consequences, in the most forceful, and extreme way, because if I mistakenly, accidently accuse someone of holding this position, they might think I am unjustly attacking their position.
> it is an argument.
It is an argument, for which many people would get upset if I claimed that this is what they are arguing. And part of acting in good faith, is not accusing someone, of very extreme opinions, unless they are even more clear, than normal.
Instead, before accusing someone of holding that position, I would leave open the possibility that there are some other, unstated arguments, that they could actually mean.
Holding open the possibility, that someone could mean many different things, as opposed to the most extreme position, is a good thing to do, so that one does not jump to accusatory conclusions.
Instead of going through all of what you just did here, why didn't you just directly state what the problem was, when someone asked?
That would be way easier. Instead of writing a paragraph, I don't know, attacking someone for not reading past threads or comments, you could just give a single sentence, that describes the issue.
That would be way faster, and then everyone is happy.
This really did not age well. There's a problem with this kind of absolute logical reasoning that it's impossible to argue against.
"Sure this company has showed evil in the past, but what specific data do you have to show that they will be evil again?"
"Sure this structure allows the company to have a lot of power, but what specifically makes you think they will abuse it?"
This kind of specious reasoning is far too common in the corporate world to remove resistance to any unpopular sentiments. There comes a point where you really have to trust your gut on something and go with it even if you cannot logically justify it in the moment. That's what separates visionaries from tacticians.
Hey, I know this is quite far downthread and didn’t get much attention - and there’s a 92% chance you won’t even see this comment due to HN’s bizarre lack of any adequate notification mechanism - but I just wanted to say I really appreciate your writing this. This crystallises a lot of thoughts I have about that kind of ‘selective pyrrhonism’, where positions one agrees with can be justified with only vague hunches (or defining your position as the null hypothesis: e.g. we default for no clear reason to assuming Amazon’s benevolence), but people who disagree are demanded to give preposterously specific evidence.
That commenter is agreeing with you. (I would say this underscores the need for everyone to speak clearly, but IMO they at least were speaking fairly clearly already.)
Rust is just getting started to see the same problems as C in the 80's (becoming successful enough that multiple competing compiler implementations emerged, which in turn required standardization). I think that the same will happen with Rust (but those can be good things, if it works more like the C committee and less like the C++ committee): first multiple competing implementations (like gccrs) will emerge, and once the situation gets too messy, a proper specification followed by an ISO standard, and a committee to carefully refine and maintain the standard.
In the 80's there wasn't internet, which is a huge help to centralize power. For example, look at Python that got popular after internet was a thing: CPython IS Python. People tried alternatives, but popularity brings even more popularity. The same thing happened with Deno recently. Sure, maybe it has a bit of traction, but it's almost nothing compared to Node. It will be the same for Rust and alternative compilers: nobody will use them outside of a few people, that will deal themselves with the consequences.
C++ is pretty much the opposite of moving fast and breaking things. It takes like 10+ years, lots of academic papers and debates, lots of peer review, to get a feature into the ISO standard. The reason it's so bloated is just because of age.
Rust is just a single implementation that's CI'ed with nightly releases.
AFAICS Steve wants to ensure that none of the members of the Foundation have more influence than the others. He seems to suggest that Amazon has taken over a significant portion of control lately (IANAL but I think by deciding to not renew the contract of the Executive Director for the foreseeable future, control of the Foundation is vested in the Chair of the Board, aka for now Amazon, and maybe they are trying to do some shady stuff)
This is all speculation, I hope Steve can write a blogpost to detail clearly the situation. He already namedropped, and these tweets with scarce information only fuel confusion, which IMHO can do severe damage, as all miscommunication problems.
Regarding Rust, Amazon has done way more good than harm. They helped in solidifying Rust as a professional language with good wages.
Developers come and go, it is unreasonable to strike the big company if the future of the language is dependent on the fact that a couple of "core" devs work at it and someone is writing articles about this and that that involves Rust.
Other languages have been through worse and survived, why not Rust?
I think that having a few prickly characters who have an extreme mistrust of large corporations is health and useful for a community that wants to keep its autonomy.
"Oh, representative of mega-corp, we can't do that . I agree it's a great idea and I would love to do it, but the zealots would revolt."
IMO Rust should have a future independent of Amazon. Ideally, we want everyone to be able to write Rust and not have it co-opted specifically for Amazon's purposes (I have no information that this is actually happening-- just reading the tweet like everyone else).
I wouldn't want a company like Google to think that Amazon has too much control over the direction of the language and choose not to use it, for example.
No? The fluff piece says this new document called “Rustacean Principles” originated from Amazon, which is true. And at a glance it seems fairly banal. https://rustacean-principles.netlify.app/
As I note elsewhere, maintaining a list of individually unobjectionable principles seems innocuous, but it is via the principles omitted from the list being thereby made harder to appeal to that you can get bad results. And, the more there are, the easier it is to reject this or that request.
I skimmed it because it looked not worth my time. But even then, who was the person, and why does it matter they're inaccurate on some LinkedInsque piece? I'll continue to think this is standard large project FOSS drama.
I like Rust, and want to know if there's a real issue, however.
Do you not greatly benefit from Amazon using the language[0]? Without users/patrons, there would be no core Rust team and what bigger patron is there than Amazon? The whole reason the Rust Foundation exists is because you lost a big player's core Rust team (Mozilla) in the first place.
Is there more context here that's missing from the tweet thread?
> And now they want to actually take Amazon's principles and claim that they're Rust's.
These just... literally... aren't Amazon's principles. At all. "The practice of coming up with pithy statements to guide decision-making" is the Amazon part.
> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
This sounds like the real concern, and it sounds really concerning, and I hope people come out to speak publicly and candidly about it. But it doesn't seem sensible to pretend that the making a list of adjectives is itself malign.
Uh it is newsworthy. This isn't Kim K tweeting about a particularly painful hangnail. It has some serious ramifications for the future of Rust if Amazon is becoming too powerful in the community.
Tenets as used internally at AWS are a set of principles that each team decides for themselves, as guides in the face of ambiguity. There's no overarching set of tenets (that I'm aware of), so this is probably just referring to the idea of having a guiding set of principles to resolve tradeoffs.
This. Each org, team, and project has their own set of tenets. There are a few common sense tenets that are overarching (Security is priority 0), but there is no one set of 'AWS tenets.'
Tenets are used as quick statements to validate decisions. And the tenants are always up for debate and revision.
Using 'AWS tenets' isn't some nefarious way to control Rust. It's borrowing a useful (IMO) management/decision making structure to help guide decisions. Using 'AWS tenants' doesn't give AWS undue influence anymore than using the concept of Andon cords gives Toyota undue influence.
I disagree a lot. I don’t think using AWS Tenets was done nefariously.. but it has an important implication on the Rust community as a whole.
Engineers are really relying on the Rust Foundation to do right by them, and by adopting Amazon or other big tech company principles it’s spitting in the face of engineers who don’t trust them and adding the potential for bias in decision making of the foundation.
I’m hopeful that the Amazon contributors will understand this and show full support.
Again, Rust hasn't adopted Amazon's principals. It has adopted a mechanism used by Amazon by which it can define its own principles.
The tenets of the team I work on are stuff like 'treat every customer like your best friend on their worst day'. And 'learn something new every day'. They are tenets of a team in AWS, which makes them (to some extent) 'AWS tenets'.
Are they somehow nefarious because there are people who don't trust anything that remotely relates to Amazon? Or are they innocuous statements of intent that are applicable to most companies?
You don't have to like or trust Toyota to use Andon cords. You don't have to like or trust McKinsey to use the 7-S framework. You don't have to like or trust Motorola to use Six Sigma. You don't have to like or trust Amazon to use 'AWS tenets'.
Right and now we are in semiconductor shortages because people adopted Toyota concepts in a non-Toyota context. In the mean time, Toyota adapted their own concepts to weather the storm of semiconductor shortages, for a short while atleast.
As the GP says, this probably refers to the practice of having short pithy statements to guide decision making. That is, AWS uses "Tenets" to help guide their decision making, Niko found that useful and wanted to do the same thing for Rust.
The post you linked to above links to a YouTube video[1] where he describes where the principles came from: some "design tenets" he came up with to help guide design of the async feature in Rust. Later he realized that they weren't specific to the async work, but were more about Rust in general. There has since been a lot of iteration involving others in the Rust community, and he's no longer calling them tenets.
And really, if you actually read the principles themselves, do they really sound like they're based on the design tenets that AWS uses? They sound an awful lot like principles that the Rust community has been using, but never articulated before. Maybe some more iteration is necessary, but it doesn't look very sinister.
This is a misunderstanding. Amazon and AWS use "tenets" as a tool for focusing and aligning a team on what it values. The Rust Principles are an application of that tool for the Rust project, not adopting the exact same tenets that teams at Amazon/AWS use. See this 90 second video for a quick rundown of how tenets are used.
Yes, that is exactly what is happening here! When the Rustacean Principles were created, Niko said in his blog post[1] that the idea of creating principles was inspired by AWS. Not that the principles themselves were taken from AWS.
Writing tenets is a tool, like making a checklist is a tool. You can use the idea of making a checklist without using the checklist items.
Steve Klabnik is well known in HN and in the Rust community, he mentioned it privately and doesn't seem to want to air dirty laundry more than he has too.
You can either see his history and trust that he wants to get as much done with as little said as possible or say you trust Amazon. Either is understandable but I think it's reasonable to be a known member of a community and speak up just enough to hopefully get the ball rolling in a better direction.
This is one of my pet peeves on social media. Nothing is worse than vague references to personal issues or something requiring inside knowledge, while the person refuses to elaborate (not saying this is true here, I haven't dug into this issue). If you're going to make it public, decide to actually make it public.
He could have expressed his concerns in a coherent blog post, that maybe could have sprawled a more serious discussion, we all know he's a good writer. Choosing to do this in a series of tweets tells just one thing - "nothing of substance here, move on".
> he mentioned it privately and doesn't seem to want to air dirty laundry more than he has too.
Unfortunately, it seems we're getting the worst of both worlds: The dirty laundry is being aired in this thread, but the actual details are being withheld.
From the Tweet thread:
> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
I'm not a fan of these "just trust me" accusations.
> I'm not a fan of these "just trust me" accusations.
Feel free to disregard the trailing sentence. However, it's not fair do discard each and any substantiated accusation by trying to shift the attention to a passing comment, specially a common one which is used as a figure of speech.
>You can either see his history and trust that he wants to get as much done with as little said as possible or say you trust Amazon
Or I can trust neither, and expect that both sides act like adults and actually state their concerns and accusations rather than vague "just trust me, you should be upset" statements.
Whipping everyone into a furor with vague concerns without actually giving enough information to address those concerns is the worst form of "discussion", if you can even call it that.
He called out specific things and had a tweet which was pretty vague about some bad behavior. If you want to focus on that and imply it's childish you are the one distracting from discussing more important issues. That's probably why takes like that get downvoted.
---
From the comments Steve has made it sounds like Amazon effectively has control of Rust not only because of their large involvement but also because a strange set of governing circumstances. I guess I can see how if he led with that it might be clearer why all the concern, guess he didn't want to spell it out so directly and point fingers.
He said in his first tweet that he wants to have a "serious conversation", then goes on to list three grievances: that Amazon has a lot of involvement in Rust leadership, that Amazon "marginalized the core team" (but no details) and that Amazon "has done some other dirty shit" (but no details).
That's two out of three grievances that have no substance whatsoever. You cannot have a serious conversation about these things if there is not more detail. I'm not distracting from anything, I'm asking Steve to either step up and discuss these things as he stated he wants to do, or he needs to stop distracting from serious issues with these snarky one-liners. If you include something like that in a tweet, you should expect to follow up on it.
It's ridiculous and disingenuous to tweet something like that and then say "well I don't actually want to talk about that and it's your fault for not reading my mind to know that".
>That's probably why takes like that get downvoted.
My comment currently has 50 upvotes. I don't think I'm the only person saying this.
I think not adding details was a warning to Amazon to step up on their front or he will indeed 'air out dirty laundry', but it does feel disingenuous given we're asked to support him based on his word (and history of rustc contributions) alone.
>> decided to not have a Rust Foundation ED, meaning Chair has outsized power in the Foundation
> that Amazon "marginalized the core team" (but no details)
That seems like details to me. It's also extrapolated on elsewhere here.
> That's two out of three grievances that have no substance whatsoever. You cannot have a serious conversation about these things if there is not more detail.
Actually, you could, just by ignoring the things you don't see evidence of and focusing on the points that do, and assessing them based on merit.
The messenger is irrelevant if the message is verifiable and is worth discussing. It's useful to call out points that seem to not be backed up, or be purposefully vague. It's not fine to use that as a reason to ignore other points because "you cannot have a serious conversation" when that's obviously not the case when it's not tried.
What merit? Lets take the claim of "marginalized the core team"?
WTF does that even mean? As in specifically, what was the action that amazon did, to marginalize anyone? Did they say mean things about them? Did they have a meeting without them? Did they kick them off of a group? Did they create a feature roadmap, without getting the core teams feedback?
Just say specifically what happened, with actual details, that describe exactly how someone was marginalize, and the consequences of that!
> reason to ignore other points
What other points? Specifically? The only verifiable point, that anyone has mentioned, is that amazon has a board seat somewhere, on some organization.
But even that point is low on details. Have they used the board seat to do anything bad? Whats the concern?
> Lets take the claim of "marginalized the core team"?
You mean, "let's take an acillary claim, not one of the core three" that are stated to be "undefinable(sp). they're just facts."?
My point, which I thought was clear, but apparently not, is that if you have a problem with the statement you brought up, sure, mention that's problematic. But is that a reason to ignore the things mentioned immediately prior, that Amazon is the lead on multiple teams, and chose not elect a new executive directory while letting the prior one go? I think not. Those are specific claims that can be assessed individually. What bearing does the "they've marginalized the core team" statement have on them that renders them being unworthy to assess?
> What other points? Specifically? The only verifiable point, that anyone has mentioned, is that amazon has a board seat somewhere, on some organization.
That exact same tweet you reference notes they've decided not to have an Executive Director. Maybe if people weren't ignoring that because of some later statement that might get some attention.
> But is that a reason to ignore the things mentioned immediately prior
Its not ignoring! Its asking people to say what the actual problem is, beyond just that Amazon has people on a couple committees.
Have these committees done anything bad? Is amazon pushing for features that people don't like? Will some future bad thing happen because of this? What is the value statement here!
> Those are specific claims that can be assessed individually.
Ok, and the problem is that nobody is actually saying why some things are bad or not.
> that might get some attention.
I still don't know why it should get attention though. So they don't have an executive director? Why should anyone care?
You keep trying to say things, without saying why anyone should care about this stuff, or why it is bad.
I could make a dozen different guesses as to why you, or others, think there is a problem. But I shouldn't have to do that.
It is on you, to both say what is happening, as well as for you to say why it is bad, and what the concern is.
Look a the comment I originally responded to. They complained that two out of three items had no substance, therefore we can't have a serious conversation. That is, specifically, what I was addressing.
> I still don't know why it should get attention though. So they don't have an executive director? Why should anyone care?
> You keep trying to say things, without saying why anyone should care about this stuff, or why it is bad.
It's specifically stated in the tweet. Not having an executive director leaves the chair with more power. Amazon is the chair. Amazon has chosen to let the position go unfilled which results in their own position having more power.
Actually asking questions about that, like you are here, is the outcome I was calling for, as opposed to ignoring it because of other statements, as the original comment I replied to was.
> It is on you, to both say what is happening, as well as for you to say why it is bad, and what the concern is.
No, you're placing me as someone on the one side of the argument, when the side is irrelevant. My point was that ignoring everything said because of portions that don't add up is not a valid way to assess the information. That doesn't require me to take a side, and in fact taking a side just makes it easier to people to dismiss my point and assume my goal is something else, as I suspect you did.
You continue to ignore the point I'm making and the context I made it in, in what appears to be an effort to push your own agenda. You can feel free to to that, but I don't see a reason to continue my part in this conversation when it feels like you're not attempting to actually engage with me.
If you care about why I think it's not worth continuing, and why I've come to this conclusion, I suggest you attempt to re-read what I wrote previously with a more open mind and instead of trying to drag it back into the specific argument. In any case, have a good evening.
Dude, even in the post that you linked, where you claim that he "goes into more detail", he is missing the main value judgement punchline.
The summary of that statement is "During that time, the chair of the board has more power than they usually would, and Amazon is chair of the board."
But once again, he is refusing to give the actual, moral punchline here.
If he wanted to convince people, he could explain all the dastardly things that he believes the board could do now. But he doesn't do that. All he says, is another statement that is devoid of moral argument, which is that "amazon is chair of the board" and that the board has more power.
The way to actually make an argument, is to not simply state facts. Instead you should say why people should care about these facts, and describe the actual material harm.
> , but I don't see a reason to continue my part in this conversation
Yes, I get it. When someone brings up the fact that basically everyone is pretty confused about the situation, and brings up how poorly this guy communicated, you have no response, and just want to assert you that you disagree, without backing it up.
>Actually, you could, just by ignoring the things you don't see evidence of and focusing on the points that do, and assessing them based on merit.
No, you really can't. Just by including the other points in the discussion, but being unwilling to extrapolate on them, shows bad faith (perhaps unintentionally) on the part of Steve and compromises the entire discussion. The only reason you include some vague "Amazon did shady shit" in a tweet is to elicit an emotional response on the part of the reader and immediately biases the argument against Amazon. The argument is not based on merit; it never can be now, because it's been tainted. This is known as "poisoning the well" [0].
Even in this thread, commenters are saying how they implicitly trust Steve not because of the merits of his argument, but because of his personal brand. He's (again, perhaps unintentionally) taking advantage of that fact by mud-slinging at Amazon, priming readers to already be biased against Amazon, and then once called out on it the response is "oh just ignore the fact that I did that and look at this other argument which I promise is more substantive". That's not arguing in good faith.
I see all that Steve has done for Rust and I see him post here (and on reddit) a lot, so I have respect for him. But this "discussion" was brought up completely the wrong way by him, and any outcome is going to be tainted. It'd be best to just let this current discussion die, and bring it up again in the future in a more appropriate manner.
> Just by including the other points in the discussion, but being unwilling to extrapolate on them
That seems a bit strong. The statement was "won't go into rn (right now)".
> compromises the entire discussion.
It does. I'm not saying it causes no problems. I'm saying it shouldn't be grounds to immediately discount all other evidence given. It's perfectly valid as a modifier to another piece of evidence where you might use it to weight it, but I don't think it's valid to immediately ignore everything else said.
> The only reason you include some vague "Amazon did shady shit" in a tweet is to elicit an emotional response on the part of the reader and immediately biases the argument against Amazon.
No, that's one possible reason, it's not the only reason. Other possible reasons might be to signal other people more involved in the events in question that if they want to share their own story, perhaps now is the time and opening that makes that easier for them.
I agree that the presented argument would have been better without that statement, but that doesn't immediately negate the merit of what else is presented.
> The argument is not based on merit; it never can be now, because it's been tainted. This is known as "poisoning the well" [0].
The mistake you're making is in assuming that poisoning the well applies to and discredits non-dependent clauses. It should be easy to see how this applies when you consider the two statements "You should beware of John, he's made some threatening gestures to me and you in the past, and I there's been some assaults in the area" and "You should beware of John, he's threatening gestures to me and you in the past and multiple people have seen him assault three people recently." In one case it's used to imply guilt of something that is not factually proven or stated, in the other there's a fact to readily look into for confirmation that you can use as evidence to make up your own mind. That someone uses a call to emotion beforehand should not immediately discount that fact from consideration.
> Even in this thread, commenters are saying how they implicitly trust Steve not because of the merits of his argument, but because of his personal brand.
That's not what I've said, and not what I'm asking of you.
> But this "discussion" was brought up completely the wrong way by him, and any outcome is going to be tainted.
It may be tainted in some way. That doesn't mean easily verifiable facts should be ignored.
To be absolutely clear, since it seems very hard for some people to get my point, I have no qualms with your mistrusting him, or thinking his factual statements have no merit or are not problematic enough to act on. I just don't think it's valid to completely ignore the factual statements and refuse to consider them as you seemed to indicate you were doing because he also says "Amazon is being a meany in other ways too" and doesn't expound on it, and some other statements may not be as well supported as they could.
Well he's one guy, against the industry behemoth. Give him some credit, rather than big brother. Even if he errs. I'd not buy any rebuttal by the thousand-pound gorilla at face value
I assume that Amazon getting too much control is a real problem. But also suspect that deep down the true concern Klabnik has is that Steve Klabnik thinks Rust is about him, or at least he is the one that is supposed to write articles about what Rust is about. Not someone from Amazon or anywhere else.
I do not think Rust is about me. Note that I specifically say that Rust should not be about any individual, let alone a company. I’ve made my case against BDFLs for years.
One of my favorite aspects of the way the Rust community has acted over the last decade is to recognize that there are many ways to contribute to open source. I know not everyone feels that way. Luckily, since I don't want Rust to be about me, we're in agreement that I should not be in charge of Rust.
He's pointing out big changes coming to control of the Rust foundation and positing that Rust foundation being controlled by one large single corporate entity probably is not a good thing. Nothing in there seemed to me like he wanted to be the one in control.
Steve is probably objecting to the paragraph that starts, "Given that Matsakis and Miller both work at AWS, it's not surprising that the [Rustacean] principles started out as a spin on Amazonian tenets."
>> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
> This sounds like the real concern
I actually think it distracts from their argument. Either say something or don 't. What purpose do vague accusations have here? Scare Amazon into behaving so not to get bad press? If the actions are concerning enough that Amazon should not have full-control, then why wouldn't those actions still not be pertinent if they do not define Rust.
Companies & languages, the only issue I am aware of is Oracle suing Google over the use of Java. Are they concern that Amazon will sue the users of Rust language?
The language and everything around it are always changing. Which ways they change involve hard choices. The way things are going, you won't know about a big change in direction until after it is all settled. It is no idle worry.
It is always hard to imagine how this or that corporation might be at odds with what benefits a language user community. But it is not at all hard for any particular corporation to discover such differences, or to act on those discoveries where they can.
The Rust Foundation has indeed been disappointingly opaque.
Their website contains only anodyne director bios and board meeting minutes. The minutes go up to May's meeting, with most of the content omitted under a "Private Session" heading.
AIUI the main need for a foundation was so they could own the Rust domain names and trademarks. Eight months later, I've seen no announcement on whether any progress has been made with this.
I don’t actually see how Amazon stewardship is a bad thing. Corporate custody has been the case for several useful programming languages, with Java, .NET, and Go being obvious and popular examples. Replacing a core team of advocacy-oriented developers with production-oriented developers might give the project a positive new direction too. After all, a popular, design-by-committee compiled language with RAII memory management that targets LLVM already exists.
If contributors can’t tolerate corporate sponsorship, then there is an abundance of languages with little to no commercial interest, especially those of academic origins.
Just based on the technology side: When using their systems a big thing, seems to be repackage and rebuild existing systems and create a load of new jargon.
The systems seem to be islands, the effect is that at every place they are separated, billing can be introduced.
Everywhere, where new names and jargon are introduced lock-in is introduced.
I cannot see it being good for the medium or long term health.
So the worst case is Amazon makes the compiler or some tool or integration a paid service? Is paying for a well-maintained compiler a problem? Ada, Java, FORTRAN, and (I think) Julia all do this, right?
Do we expect too much? Just like with Mozilla? We want them to be a force for good, but they also need to be effective. Though this is less true for Rust than for Mozilla, Rust the language shouldn't really need a revenue
I can understand every aversion to Amazon having control over Rust. But looking at these principles:
* “Reliable: If it compiles, it works.”
* “Performant: Idiomatic code runs efficiently.”
* “Supportive: The language, tools, and community are here to help.”
* “Productive: A little effort does a lot of work.”
* “Transparent: You can predict and control low-level details.”
* “Versatile: You can do anything with Rust.”
I don't really see what the problem is. They aren't particularly Amazonian principles, and they all seem like good things to strive for.
My biggest complaint would be having Amazonians having control over feature roadmap and code acceptance. Amazon's priorities very often are in direct conflict with literally everyone else's priorities. Not to mention the fact that I've seen a lot of code at Amazon, know how nightmarish it is, and can reasonably infer that the internal politics at Amazon do not allow for, and often penalize, quality code. It is not at all unthinkable that some department with stupid priorities and lots of political clout pushes through some half-baked shit bonanza that will bite everyone else in the ass. That is a problem.
The problem is that they are bromides and claptrap, not principles. There is an important distinction to be made here between principles and values, which they are not making in part because Amazon themselves do not understand the difference.[0] Having a community define its values is important[1], but this is emphatically not the way to do it -- and these are not it besides.
Honestly, I take issue with all of them -- including that one. "If it compiles, it works" is demonstrably false, and pernicious in perhaps surprising ways. As a concrete example, I believe the DWARF support for Rust to be extremely important -- but why would one invest in improving that if "it compiles, it works"? I know that undermining debugging infrastructure is not the intent here, but that's kind of the point: words are important, and the ones that have been chosen for these are exceedingly sloppy.
In terms of how to run a tech foundation, no (former) employee of Mozilla has any standing to talk. Mozilla has watched Firefox market share evaporate, laid off core tech teams, all the while increasing the pay of their leadership.
I am completely willing to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt, and let them be involved in the Rust foundation as they see fit.
The great thing about open source, is that the code is open source. If enough developers don't like the way stuff is being handled, they are free to fork.
"making deals" is the wrong characterization. "Bring my concerns to the people I have concerns with in private before having to talk about it in public" is just the right way to talk to people about problems.
Sure, I understand that, but the tweetstorm is very non-specific. The only reason why I share your concern is because you built an amazing personal brand.
I tried to be very specific in my issue with what is public knowledge: Amazon has outsized influence in the project, and is continuing to wield it to gain more. I even cited specific ways in which that is happening.
I was also vague about other things because they're secondary concerns to the main one. If Amazon stops trying to be in total control of Rust, I'll be happy.
> "Bring my concerns to the people I have concerns with in private before having to talk about it in public" is just the right way to talk to people about problems.
Yes, it typically is. However making non-falsifiable public accusations that individuals are doing "dirty shit" is not keeping things "private" and is even worse than making a concrete public statement about a concern you may have.
I get that but tweeting "they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn." is the kind of statement that burns bridges pretty hard.
I think rust is great, and I love with the rust community has accomplished, and I wouldn't want to see Amazon break that. But from this thread I don't know enough to raise objections. It sounds like a Rust foundation governance issue, the sort of thing that comes up from time-to-time on most big successful projects.
> But from this thread I don't know enough to raise objections. It sounds like a Rust foundation governance issue, the sort of thing that comes up from time-to-time on most big successful projects.
I'm also confused. The Tweet thread switches between Amazon and Rust Foundation almost interchangeably. Is the implication that Amazon has co-opted the Rust foundation? Are the other Rust Foundation members being sidelined? Or is this a deeper objection about the existence of a corporate-sponsored Rust Foundation?
Could you elaborate on what is so important about the chair of the foundation? From what I understand, it's not really stewardship of the language so much as stewardship of a bunch of administrative minutiae.
Administrative minutiae is important. The foundation controls our IP and a large pot of money. How that is used matters. I am not taking any beef with specific moves here, just pointing out that a single organization controls a lot, more than most people probably realize.
We have used AWS since long before Amazon was a supporter of Rust, and then they started supporting us, and I am grateful to it. Paying for Rust's infrastructure, as far as I know, is not cheap.
I am not a member of the foundation and so can't really speak to what is being spent currently. As far as I know a public budget has not been posted.
The risk is that they can set the direction to anything. They might be amazing stewards, they might spend it all on useless things. We don't yet know. I do know that many of the folks in the foundation have their hearts in the right place.
Again, the theme isn't about specific actions, it is about consolidation of control.
I wholeheartedly agree. I would also love to eventually read a clear-eyed breakdown of the current situation and relevant history.
If you find a time when you feel your head is clear enough to write a detailed summary I'm sure many others would benefit from reading it as well. It's probably important to ensure that anything like this is written when your emotions are extremely well-managed, and also important to run it by many of the coolest, most-level headed colleagues that you trust -- and heavily weight their revisions.
I also congratulate the Rust team on getting to a point where they've made something valuable enough that worrying about regressive corporate influence is even warranted. I really do owe Rustaceans a large thanks for building something I enjoy so much.
Hopefully Rust can grow in a healthy way with generous corporate support, and find the guardrails necessary to mitigate the usual negative consequences that come along with the benefits.
I did not expect that this would happen back then, but it has happened now. I was wrong.
(I also thought they were saying the foundation was exerting control over the language, which is incorrect, strictly speaking. The foundation has no formal powers over the language itself.)
If anything, I now find myself more inclined to believe your contentions; you approached this issue as a skeptic and still walked away believing there to be a significant area of concern.
Rust isn't the only community that's at risk of getting coopted by corporate sponsors. The PostgreSQL core team now has an explicit policy that no single company employs more than half its members -- but to follow it, last year, they had to expand membership (after companies employing 50% of the prior core team merged, and they didn't want to boot anyone).
Oddly enough, the post you linked to is from the blog of Fundación PostgreSQL, which is also being discussed on HN today due to a dispute with the PostgreSQL core team:
It's worth noting that this has been an informal rule for over 20 years, the organisations in question are Postgres specific specialists and the developers in question have long histories with the project. I don't think it's quite the same to be honest.
the situation is not the same, but the familiar corporate pressures expected to emerge and the reasons for the rule are the same: it bears scrutiny and oversight. If an erosion of trust in a group like this is not something to worry about, what is?
The worry is that "If my livelihood, and that of those whom I work with every day, were in jeopardy, I would be tempted to use my authority for the good of my company over the good of the broader user base."
Which... I find it hard to imagine a random selection of individuals, the majority of which wouldn't be susceptible to that. Everyone has to eat, and there are always catastrophes in business eventually.
Honestly this is what I was afraid of when Mozilla backed off on Rust support and Amazon and others stepped in to fill the gap. One of the main selling points for me to start learning Rust was the truly open-source pedigree - with Mozilla backing it there seemed to be very few perverse incentives going against Rust's goals of having a great developer story.
If Amazon would be in the drivers' seat, that incentive structure would seem much less clear.
To be clear, the Rust Foundation has no influence over the design or development of the language, stdlib, or tooling. Those are duties of the dedicated Rust teams listed at https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/ , and the foundation has no power to determine the membership of those teams.
Google has Go, now Amazon has Rust, and Amazon will not let Rust go away.
Amazon has enough money (and no moral or ethics) to take Rust and twist the reality to make people believe Amazon is right and Rust community is wrong.
Not all of those are necessarily intentionally libelous. Many could be based on misunderstandings caused by reading the InfoWorld article before it was updated to be somewhat less of a paean to Amazon, or not reading it at all.
genuinely curious, has there been any evidence in the past of large corporations decreasing the quality of programming languages that they have influence over?
I know some people took issue with Oracle buying Sun and controlling Java, and I think it had something to do with licensing. Perhaps that doesn't qualify, though.
I was ... let's say "apprehensive" ... when I heard Oracle had purchased Sun, and thus control of Java.
However, with the exception of some communication missteps around the licensing changes (which actually ended up in fully open source JDK, as opposed to the mostly open source JDK in Sun's time), Java has actually done great under Oracle.
Amazing what having resources can do for a project, eh?
I mean, I'm not thrilled with the licensing model around GraalVM (since it's another "mostly" open source situation), but business is business, I guess. I'd personally prefer that they treat it the same as Java proper, and fund it via support contracts/subscriptions.
Companies do periodically try to take over C++. Several have sought to throw their weight around by sending numerous extra bodies to vote at selected ISO C++ Committee meetings. They do not often succeed at that, but some have continuously outsized influence on the process, at all levels, just by their sheer amount of participation.
The people they send to meetings on a regular basis do a great deal of important work, and they often disagree among themselves. But sometimes marching orders evidently come down.
There was a recent concerted effort to define a process to determine when and where backward ABI compatibility should be abandoned, which would have made it much easier to bring about such occasions.
Maintaining a list of individually unobjectionable principles seems innocuous, but it is via the principles omitted from the list being thereby made harder to appeal to that you can get bad results. And, the more there are, the easier it is to reject this or that request.
Define "corporate language". All of those languages are more or less completely dominated by a single corporate sponsor with a significant portion of the decisions and discussions being done internally, so the potential for drama to spill out is a bit less.
362 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] thread>> We spent years trying to get away from this situation. It had tons of negative effects.
>> Why are we regressing here?
Amazon has an interest in using Rust to help build their software, probably for heavy use in AWS.
Amazon also has a lot of money and talent that can help Rust continue to grow and improve.
It is a delicate balance to accept help and resources, but not let Amazon take too much control.
What should be done?
I can assure you she would have been happy to continue to be the executive director.
I talked about this briefly in the thread, but wasn't quite clear enough, so might as well also elaborate here, since it was brought up. I am not worried that she will not be the next ED. I mean, I would have preferred it, but it's not my decision to make. The structural issue here is that the foundation decided to forgo extending her contract while looking for a new ED; this means that the foundation currently does not have one, and we don't know when a new one is coming. During that time, the chair of the board has more power than they usually would, and Amazon is chair of the board.
She worked to ensure it become a critical part of the Rust/Wasm ecosystem and then silently stopped maintaining it. For most of 2020 / 2021 `wasm-pack` was not updated with pull requests and security fixes because Ashley did not transfer publish rights.
Even though `wasm-pack` became unusable for many users it was still described as necessary in the official Rust / Wasm tutorials. Likely this set back the Rust/Wasm ecosystem by discouraging many new members.
It would have been far better if she just spoke up and asked for help.
It seems she wanted to ignore a problem she didn't want to deal with, which I can relate to, but that's not a good quality in an executive director.
Some relevant GitHub issues: https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/914 https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/928
There is an easy and appropriate response to this - just fork() the project under a new name. There's nothing wrong with this, especially when the maintainer doesn't respond to community inquiries. People in the open source community are generally volunteers, so we shouldn't expect or require them to "speak up" if it can be avoided.
First, wasm-pack is not Ashley's personal project, it is an official Rust Wasm project. That means it is owned by the Rust Wasm team, and it is maintained by the Rust Wasm team. It is an official part of Rust, similar to how cargo and rustdoc are an official part of Rust. wasm-pack was never intended to be maintained only by Ashley.
Multiple Rust Wasm Core team members (including myself) politely asked Ashley multiple times to transfer publishing rights to the Rust Wasm Core team (which she was supposed to have done months ago), but she refused.
Multiple people had politely offered to take over maintenance of wasm-pack (when it was clear that Ashley was unwilling to do so), but once again she refused. She knew how important wasm-pack is to Rust Wasm, but she did not want to give up control and power, even though it wasn't even supposed to be her package in the first place.
Second, forking is not as simple or as easy as you claim... forking is something that has a very high cost, so it should be done as a last resort. wasm-pack is an official Rust package (and it is vital to Rust Wasm), and so forking it would have a lot of costs:
* A new crate would have to be created (what should it be called? wasm-pack2?)
* The GitHub repo would have to be changed or transferred.
* Multiple different documentation websites (including the official Rust website) would need to be updated.
* A newsletter would need to be sent out informing everybody of the change.
* All existing projects would need to switch to the new package.
* The old package would still exist, which would be very confusing for people, especially because many tutorials and blogs would still be referring to the old wasm-pack!
* Ashley herself would throw a huge tantrum over it, because she would view it as taking control away from herself. And because she is a Rust Core team member, her tantrum would have power behind it.
Forking is absolutely NOT an appropriate solution in this case. Ashley's behavior was simply wrong, unacceptable, and reflects very poorly on the Rust team (which she is a part of).
As for Ashley's personal character... before she worked for Rust, she worked for npm. While she was working there, she tried to falsely accuse Rod Vagg because she wanted to kick him out of npm. Thankfully she failed, and after she failed she quit npm:
https://thenewstack.io/node-js-forked-complaints-repeated-ha...
https://medium.com/@rvagg/the-truth-about-rod-vagg-f063f6a53...
While she was working for npm, she violated npm's Code of Conduct numerous times, saying incredibly horrible sexist and racist things such as "kill all men", and actively trying to prevent white men from speaking at tech conferences:
https://archive.fo/f10KK
No, she was not joking, and even if it was "just a joke" it is unacceptable. If a man said "kill all women" even as a joke he would be immediately fired and blacklisted from all companies.
Despite all of this, she was still hired onto the Rust Core team, because she is in a romantic relationship with Steve Klabnik (nepotism). Interestingly, Steve Klabnik is also the same person who is smearing Amazon because Amazon denied a job to Ashley.
The Rust Core team was aware of Ashley's past behavior, yet they hired her anyways. And even though numerous people spoke out about this, they were silenced and censored by the Rust team:
https://internals.rust-la...
“There are 2 entities which make decisions...the contract for the person holding the post of 1 of those 2 entities was not extended by the other entity, and the other entity has not given any timeline on when they expect to fulfill that position, therefore leading to a situation where it’s the only entity with power” is not “I want it run by my pal”.
I expect that it was a group decision and not a sole one. But again, my point is not about how that happened, my point is that it has happened, and what that means for the state of the organization as a whole, that is, that leadership is concentrated in a single organization.
1: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-06-25-announcing...
Would it be better if Rust was a part of the Apache foundation?
Ahem.
Many people think that the best thing for projects like this is to have as many entities involved as possible. Anything that is controlled by single entity is bound to forget the needs of others.
For example: neither Mozilla nor Amazon might have Embedded Systems as a core interest, so they will forget about it and might accidently make decisions that ate bad for this use cases. If you also have ARM, Microcontroller vendors and so on on board, they will make sure that this topic isn't overlooked.
That is perhaps the biggest concern.
When a large tech company controls governance, their needs and priorities come first.
We have seen similar concerns with other programming languages in the past: Java (Sun / Oracle), Go (Google), Swift (Apple).
Exclusive or dominant control is not necessarily bad (depends on how transparently the governance process runs and who is involved), but it can severely limit the programming language community's effect and leave the needs of some groups unfulfilled.
I thought that was CA? Oh wait, no, that's where they go after they're dead.
As an outsider, I felt that Mozilla lend credibility to Rusts efforts, and Rust gave Mozilla relevance.
There's also the "if the company goes evil the project may also be affected", like Red Hat pulling the carpet under CentOS or many other examples.
Guess which FAANG company has de facto control of the foundation now? I'll give you two hints: it starts with A and isn't Apple.
Also, without a generous benefactor, open source languages have to scrape funding together piecemeal from different sources. For example, both Rust and Go have had (or still have) dedicated staff writing documentation for the language. This is a luxury that other languages (e.g. Nim or Crystal) cannot fund or afford.
All languages want to attract developers and a key question is: how can languages without a big corporate benefactor attract funding to help grow the language and build related libraries?
That problem is fundamental. As soon as one entity gets too much control, it's impossible to wrest control back without their agreement, or a long protracted battle which will hurt the thing being fought over.
Nobody is saying keep corporate interests completely divorced, this is just a call to be aware that one interest is getting too much power, whether on purpose or just through increased interest on their part, but the end result is the same. If we care about Rust not being beholden to one entity at the expense of others, then action should be taken now (even if that action is just much increased scrutiny and asking Amazon to please make sure the executive directory position is filled ASAP, and not with someone Amazon affiliated).
RIP.
Even though Mozilla was pretty hands-off from Rust, management wise, one thing being in control of something like this just has a lot of effects. I'm not really prepared to go into a full retro of Mozilla's involvement with Rust here, I just wanted to note that there was also a lot of good there.
And apparently that couldn't change until Rust went off on its independent journey.
I hope the Rust team finds a way out, but I suspect now that if Amazon has their hooks in it then they'll just fork it.
I'm sure it was. But it's six years on, and companies have gotten involved. They now have a financial stake. It would be naive to think that evangelism is still genuine grass roots, in the same way that it's naive to think the stuff on your FB feed reflects what your friends find interesting and worth sharing.
I feared this would happen months ago when Facebook joined the board and even talked to steve about my concerns [0] [1].
Unfortunately it has come true with no surprise.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125591
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26989286
for them to do what?
> I feared this would happen months ago
feared what would happen?
> Unfortunately it has come true with no surprise.
what has come true?
In this post and the first thread you linked, you're doing the same thing – raising concerns without saying what those concerns are. They might be valid concerns, but if you only allude to them without ever stating them, nobody will know!
We shouldn't be giving corporations too much power by letting them buy board seats in a foundation to steer the language, in this case Rust.
Rust doesn't seem community led anymore.
No, nobody does. You keep making vague statements like this without actually saying anything.
>I assume you've read the links in my comment and the tweets
Yea, they just link to more of your own comments stating vague things like "I knew this would happen" (again, without ever saying what "this" is).
If you have concerns, state them. Otherwise this contributes nothing to the discussion.
And even steve is concerned about the structure himself, if you have bothered to read the tweets.
Maybe you should actually read my comment and the links before replying.
What are your concerns, exactly? Do you even have any, or are you just being dramatic about "big company bad"?
Where did I say "big company bad"?, I'm not against them sponsoring a project, they shouldn't get the opportunity to buy a board seat, which is what Rust's structure allows. Hence why, it's appearing that Rust isn't being led by the community.
Before you continue to gaslight me again, you can have companies (big ones) that sponsor a project/foundation and not be given a board seat.
Now I'm assuming you just jumped into the comments without understanding anything no?
EDIT:
> We shouldn't be giving corporations too much power by letting them buy board seats in a foundation to steer the language, in this case Rust.
@stale2002 I already mentioned this issue. However the user @secuthro22 continued trolling further with: "WhAT cONCerns?"
If someone makes vague claims like that, they deserve to be dismissed. It is on you to state your concerns clearly, not on other people to read between the lines.
Well apparently there are a whole lot of people , in this thread who agree with me, that this was all pretty unclear.
If most people are unable to understand you or your arguments, that is the fault of the communicator, for being so bad at communicating.
Sure. But is this really about "most people" -- or just a (very) vocal minority that doesn't (want to) understand? It's not like there are thousands of people asking for clarification; I make it three, including you.
I'm just saying that at least to me,
>>> Still don't know why we should let these big tech companies have board seats on programming language foundations for them to have the power to do this. [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513316 ]
and, at the latest,
>>> they shouldn't get the opportunity to buy a board seat, which is what Rust's structure allows. Hence why, it's appearing that Rust isn't being led by the community. [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514247 ]
felt perfectly clear. That's yanonninator's [sp?] whole beef, right there (twice over), AFAICS. What's not to understand about that?
Whats not to understand is the moral punchline of any of this, which is left completely unjustified, and is merely implied, without any reasons given.
Don't just say "They have a board seat". Instead say "They have a board seat, and are using that board seat for bad things X,Y, and Z, which have negative consequences A, B, and C".
Do you see how the corrected statement, actually gives people something to engage with, instead of someone merely asserting the amoral, unopinionated fact of "They have a board seat"?
If you actually make an argument, then other people can judge if they agree that things X, Y, and Z are bad, or they can judge if they agree or disagree with the consequences of A,B, and C.
But, when someone just says "They have a board seat", they are making a unopinionated factual statement, as opposed to actually justifying what the tweets intend to imply, which is that them having a board seat is bad for certain reasons which are unstated.
Unfortunately, though, I expect the reasons as for why the moral arguments are unstated, is because the person doesn't actually have any moral arguments. Instead, they likely just want to imply that certain things are wrong, without actually having to defend or give reasons as for why the things are at all bad.
Yes and no:
Yes, I understand that to some people, obviously including you, "They have [bought] a board seat" is an "amoral, unopinionated fact".
But no, that's not "instead of merely". Looks to me like the problem is that you don't see that to many people, "They have [bought] a board seat" is not just an "amoral, unopinionated fact" but in itself already a moral punchline to engage with. There is no need for any tweets to "intend to imply" anything. Whether any non-beneficial consequences have followed or are immediately to expect is, in their view, irrelevant: That's just not how shit is supposed to work, i.e. wrong in itself.
And frankly, it's a bit baffling to me how you and those who argue like you seem to have such a hard time understanding this view. I mean, it's one thing not to agree with it, but you're all coming off as if it hasn't even occurred to you that it's possible to see things that way. Makes me wonder if you're seriously so blind, or if it's some underhanded debating tactic. Whichever it is, in my eyes it seriously weakens your argument.
If I were a fiction writer, I could write a dozen different reasons as for what the problem is. But the issue is, that although I could definitely make up reasons, in my fiction book, as for why this is an issue, it tells me nothing about how this actually applies to the Rust community.
If you actually make the argument yourself, then it allows people to understand if there are specific issues, that are more or less bad, based on the informed opinion of someone directly from the community, instead of our uninformed, guesses, that might be right, or wrong, or slightly wrong.
For example, maybe the problem is similar to what Microsoft used to do. Maybe it isn't. Maybe Amazon is doing something that is bad, in a separate and different way, than what Microsoft did decades ago.
But if you don't actually make the argument, then other people cannot tell if the issue is bad, in a similar way as to how other past issues were, or if it is bad in a different way, than how the microsoft situation was bad.
Thats why it is better if people actually make the argument. Because although, yes, I could write a fiction book, or a script for a movie, to describe why these hypothetical issues are bad, I might get it completely wrong, and that the actual thing is bad in a different way, because of something specific to the rust community.
> if it hasn't even occurred to you that it's possible to see things that way.
The problem is that I can imagine a dozen different possible ways to "see things that way", which might be completely off the mark, or exactly correct of the reality of the situation.
I can imagine multiple different universes, where my guess would be right, or wrong, and I don't actually know which universe I am in, unless the informed party actually makes the argument, all the way through.
So I can both imagine arguments, as well as imagine how those guesses could be wrong, and why maybe the situation is wrong in a different way, than my first X number of guesses.
Thats why it is so much better if the person actually makes the argument, all the way through.
> Whether any non-beneficial consequences have followed or are immediately to expect is, in their view, irrelevant
Hey, if they had specifically said the following "I concede that there are no other negative effects at all, and that amazon hasn't done anything bad, and I have no other arguments, beyond them having a board seat is bad, in and of itself, with no other justification", then that would be an actual understandable, and straight forward argument!
But they might have made different arguments. If it literally is that they have absolutely no other arguments, beyond "Them having a board seat is bad, and there are no other bad consequences", then it would be nice if they explicitly said that.
> If I were a fiction writer, I could write a dozen different reasons as for what the problem is. But the issue is, that although I could definitely make up reasons, in my fiction book, as for why this is an issue, it tells me nothing about how this actually applies to the Rust community.
You're still not getting it: It's NOT A MATTER OF "applies". It's a question of principle.
> If you actually make the argument yourself, then it allows people to understand if there are specific issues, that are more or less bad, based on the informed opinion of someone directly from the community, instead of our uninformed, guesses, that might be right, or wrong, or slightly wrong.
He already made his argument in full. It's just that you're refusing to acknowledge that it is an argument.
So, thank you, I think I'm done here: I'm obviously unable to convey to you what you're not getting, and I don't think you need to go any more rounds of the same -- I trust it's clear enough to everyone else by now that this is due to your stubborn refusal.
Principles could apply to a given community in different ways. One principle in one context, could be more important than others. Thus, the person explaining their position out, even further, is useful.
For example, the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", is very important for law, because it involves locking people up.
But it is likely much less important, for determining if your friend lied to you about why they didn't want to go to dinner yesterday. The only consequence of this, is maybe you'll be a little bit annoyed at your friend.
Or take the principle of "free speech", which people talk about as a principle, and not just a law, all the time. Free speech is a principle, but it is still more important when it relates to the government, than to private individuals and what individuals allow to be said in their houses.
Thats why bringing up the principle, as it relates to the rust community, is important for a knowledgeable person to do.
> He already made his argument in full.
If someone is making, this pretty.... shall we say... specific argument which is straight up "There are no negative consequences at all to this, but I don't care", it is important to be more clear about it.
The reason, is because that is an opinion, that many people would normally only accuse someone of having, as a straight up attack. As in, People attack someone, by claiming that this is their position.
And because someone in good faith, might not want to attack someone, unjustly, it is important for the person making the original argument, to be even more clear, than normal.
I would be extremely hesitant to accuse someone of holding that position, unless they say, multiple times, that they simply do not care about any negative consequences, in the most forceful, and extreme way, because if I mistakenly, accidently accuse someone of holding this position, they might think I am unjustly attacking their position.
> it is an argument.
It is an argument, for which many people would get upset if I claimed that this is what they are arguing. And part of acting in good faith, is not accusing someone, of very extreme opinions, unless they are even more clear, than normal.
Instead, before accusing someone of holding that position, I would leave open the possibility that there are some other, unstated arguments, that they could actually mean.
Holding open the possibility, that someone could mean many different things, as opposed to the most extreme position, is a good thing to do, so that one does not jump to accusatory conclusions.
That would be way easier. Instead of writing a paragraph, I don't know, attacking someone for not reading past threads or comments, you could just give a single sentence, that describes the issue.
That would be way faster, and then everyone is happy.
"Sure this company has showed evil in the past, but what specific data do you have to show that they will be evil again?"
"Sure this structure allows the company to have a lot of power, but what specifically makes you think they will abuse it?"
This kind of specious reasoning is far too common in the corporate world to remove resistance to any unpopular sentiments. There comes a point where you really have to trust your gut on something and go with it even if you cannot logically justify it in the moment. That's what separates visionaries from tacticians.
How so? Would you like to explain how you came to this conclusion?
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1437441118745071617.html
What have they moved fast on and what's breaking for you?
Rust is just a single implementation that's CI'ed with nightly releases.
1. write software thats high performance 2. minimize defects 3. can be used for a variety of sitauations
There are all things I want from rust as does the community as a whole. Seems like the incentives are lined up in a way thats beneficial for everyone.
maybe someone else can educate me on something I don't know here?
This is all speculation, I hope Steve can write a blogpost to detail clearly the situation. He already namedropped, and these tweets with scarce information only fuel confusion, which IMHO can do severe damage, as all miscommunication problems.
Developers come and go, it is unreasonable to strike the big company if the future of the language is dependent on the fact that a couple of "core" devs work at it and someone is writing articles about this and that that involves Rust.
Other languages have been through worse and survived, why not Rust?
And there is no reason to believe that the growth would not have continued without Amazon's participation.
There's the simple fact that many major non Amazon companies are also supporting Rust, so I don't see how this is uniquely Amazon's contributions.
This argument appears akin to the original article's "Rustacean principles are based on Amazon tenets" BS.
"Amazon must or should define Rust".
"I refuse to let you physically abuse your wife, Jim" implies something.
"Oh, representative of mega-corp, we can't do that . I agree it's a great idea and I would love to do it, but the zealots would revolt."
I wouldn't want a company like Google to think that Amazon has too much control over the direction of the language and choose not to use it, for example.
Maybe, but that's only because Rust was valuable enough to them to do so. It also doesn't give them a pass on a takeover, if that is what's going on.
(No skin in this game. I just can't stand corporate gaslighting about how open source developers need to suck up abuse and like it because reasons.)
And Amazon as heavy users of Rust have people on the committees? What's the process to getting them those seats? Voting?
> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
How?
OpenSource politics is sometimes the worst.
Wrote a fluff article about how Rust principles originated with Amazon, which is rank nonsense.
I like Rust, and want to know if there's a real issue, however.
Steve's forgotten who pays the bills. I hope he gets canned from the Rust team and learns to be humble once again.
Also, Amazon has never paid me, and I doubt they ever will.
[0]https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/02/rust-foundation-announced...
> And now they want to actually take Amazon's principles and claim that they're Rust's.
These just... literally... aren't Amazon's principles. At all. "The practice of coming up with pithy statements to guide decision-making" is the Amazon part.
> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
This sounds like the real concern, and it sounds really concerning, and I hope people come out to speak publicly and candidly about it. But it doesn't seem sensible to pretend that the making a list of adjectives is itself malign.
When is there not? Tweets are a horrible medium for contextual information.
This reads like drama for the sake of drama.
Edit: I should have said that posting this to HN is just posting drama. Using twitter to vent is fine, just not newsworthy in any way.
He just yells through twitter.
Tenets are used as quick statements to validate decisions. And the tenants are always up for debate and revision.
Using 'AWS tenets' isn't some nefarious way to control Rust. It's borrowing a useful (IMO) management/decision making structure to help guide decisions. Using 'AWS tenants' doesn't give AWS undue influence anymore than using the concept of Andon cords gives Toyota undue influence.
Engineers are really relying on the Rust Foundation to do right by them, and by adopting Amazon or other big tech company principles it’s spitting in the face of engineers who don’t trust them and adding the potential for bias in decision making of the foundation.
I’m hopeful that the Amazon contributors will understand this and show full support.
The tenets of the team I work on are stuff like 'treat every customer like your best friend on their worst day'. And 'learn something new every day'. They are tenets of a team in AWS, which makes them (to some extent) 'AWS tenets'.
Are they somehow nefarious because there are people who don't trust anything that remotely relates to Amazon? Or are they innocuous statements of intent that are applicable to most companies?
You don't have to like or trust Toyota to use Andon cords. You don't have to like or trust McKinsey to use the 7-S framework. You don't have to like or trust Motorola to use Six Sigma. You don't have to like or trust Amazon to use 'AWS tenets'.
The post you linked to above links to a YouTube video[1] where he describes where the principles came from: some "design tenets" he came up with to help guide design of the async feature in Rust. Later he realized that they weren't specific to the async work, but were more about Rust in general. There has since been a lot of iteration involving others in the Rust community, and he's no longer calling them tenets.
And really, if you actually read the principles themselves, do they really sound like they're based on the design tenets that AWS uses? They sound an awful lot like principles that the Rust community has been using, but never articulated before. Maybe some more iteration is necessary, but it doesn't look very sinister.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksSuXNmGZNA&t=2001s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5raEKA57PMY
(Disclosure, I'm an Amazon employee and am familiar with how Amazon uses Tenets for teams)
Writing tenets is a tool, like making a checklist is a tool. You can use the idea of making a checklist without using the checklist items.
[1] https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2021/09/08/rus...
You can either see his history and trust that he wants to get as much done with as little said as possible or say you trust Amazon. Either is understandable but I think it's reasonable to be a known member of a community and speak up just enough to hopefully get the ball rolling in a better direction.
The not airing dirty laundry and not detailing the issue means no one knows what is going on and no one can help.
If it's a private fight I would understand if they wanted to keep it private. If it's a public issue what is happening.
Unfortunately, it seems we're getting the worst of both worlds: The dirty laundry is being aired in this thread, but the actual details are being withheld.
From the Tweet thread:
> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
I'm not a fan of these "just trust me" accusations.
Feel free to disregard the trailing sentence. However, it's not fair do discard each and any substantiated accusation by trying to shift the attention to a passing comment, specially a common one which is used as a figure of speech.
Or I can trust neither, and expect that both sides act like adults and actually state their concerns and accusations rather than vague "just trust me, you should be upset" statements.
Whipping everyone into a furor with vague concerns without actually giving enough information to address those concerns is the worst form of "discussion", if you can even call it that.
There is no substance to the tweets (it's his twitter account, go wild), and really has no business being here.
---
From the comments Steve has made it sounds like Amazon effectively has control of Rust not only because of their large involvement but also because a strange set of governing circumstances. I guess I can see how if he led with that it might be clearer why all the concern, guess he didn't want to spell it out so directly and point fingers.
That's two out of three grievances that have no substance whatsoever. You cannot have a serious conversation about these things if there is not more detail. I'm not distracting from anything, I'm asking Steve to either step up and discuss these things as he stated he wants to do, or he needs to stop distracting from serious issues with these snarky one-liners. If you include something like that in a tweet, you should expect to follow up on it.
It's ridiculous and disingenuous to tweet something like that and then say "well I don't actually want to talk about that and it's your fault for not reading my mind to know that".
>That's probably why takes like that get downvoted.
My comment currently has 50 upvotes. I don't think I'm the only person saying this.
I don’t fault him as he didn’t post it here but it is definitely not fully clear from reading it what’s going on.
> that Amazon "marginalized the core team" (but no details)
That seems like details to me. It's also extrapolated on elsewhere here.
> That's two out of three grievances that have no substance whatsoever. You cannot have a serious conversation about these things if there is not more detail.
Actually, you could, just by ignoring the things you don't see evidence of and focusing on the points that do, and assessing them based on merit.
The messenger is irrelevant if the message is verifiable and is worth discussing. It's useful to call out points that seem to not be backed up, or be purposefully vague. It's not fine to use that as a reason to ignore other points because "you cannot have a serious conversation" when that's obviously not the case when it's not tried.
What merit? Lets take the claim of "marginalized the core team"?
WTF does that even mean? As in specifically, what was the action that amazon did, to marginalize anyone? Did they say mean things about them? Did they have a meeting without them? Did they kick them off of a group? Did they create a feature roadmap, without getting the core teams feedback?
Just say specifically what happened, with actual details, that describe exactly how someone was marginalize, and the consequences of that!
> reason to ignore other points
What other points? Specifically? The only verifiable point, that anyone has mentioned, is that amazon has a board seat somewhere, on some organization.
But even that point is low on details. Have they used the board seat to do anything bad? Whats the concern?
You mean, "let's take an acillary claim, not one of the core three" that are stated to be "undefinable(sp). they're just facts."?
My point, which I thought was clear, but apparently not, is that if you have a problem with the statement you brought up, sure, mention that's problematic. But is that a reason to ignore the things mentioned immediately prior, that Amazon is the lead on multiple teams, and chose not elect a new executive directory while letting the prior one go? I think not. Those are specific claims that can be assessed individually. What bearing does the "they've marginalized the core team" statement have on them that renders them being unworthy to assess?
> What other points? Specifically? The only verifiable point, that anyone has mentioned, is that amazon has a board seat somewhere, on some organization.
That exact same tweet you reference notes they've decided not to have an Executive Director. Maybe if people weren't ignoring that because of some later statement that might get some attention.
Its not ignoring! Its asking people to say what the actual problem is, beyond just that Amazon has people on a couple committees.
Have these committees done anything bad? Is amazon pushing for features that people don't like? Will some future bad thing happen because of this? What is the value statement here!
> Those are specific claims that can be assessed individually.
Ok, and the problem is that nobody is actually saying why some things are bad or not.
> that might get some attention.
I still don't know why it should get attention though. So they don't have an executive director? Why should anyone care?
You keep trying to say things, without saying why anyone should care about this stuff, or why it is bad.
I could make a dozen different guesses as to why you, or others, think there is a problem. But I shouldn't have to do that.
It is on you, to both say what is happening, as well as for you to say why it is bad, and what the concern is.
Look a the comment I originally responded to. They complained that two out of three items had no substance, therefore we can't have a serious conversation. That is, specifically, what I was addressing.
> I still don't know why it should get attention though. So they don't have an executive director? Why should anyone care?
> You keep trying to say things, without saying why anyone should care about this stuff, or why it is bad.
It's specifically stated in the tweet. Not having an executive director leaves the chair with more power. Amazon is the chair. Amazon has chosen to let the position go unfilled which results in their own position having more power.
He goes into more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513656
Actually asking questions about that, like you are here, is the outcome I was calling for, as opposed to ignoring it because of other statements, as the original comment I replied to was.
> It is on you, to both say what is happening, as well as for you to say why it is bad, and what the concern is.
No, you're placing me as someone on the one side of the argument, when the side is irrelevant. My point was that ignoring everything said because of portions that don't add up is not a valid way to assess the information. That doesn't require me to take a side, and in fact taking a side just makes it easier to people to dismiss my point and assume my goal is something else, as I suspect you did.
The problem is that, it is pretty clear, that based on how many people have agree with me, that this guy was unclear.
There was obviously a lot of confusion here. And that is a valid criticism of this person.
> My point was that ignoring everything said
The fact that so many people are confused about what the guy is saying, is on him.
He should have communicated better. And no, it is not everyone else's fault, that basically everyone misunderstood his point.
> He goes into more detail here
Well maybe he should have done a better job of communicating his ideas, from the very beginning. That's on him.
The fact that he was so bad at saying what the problem was, and why we should care, from the very beginning, is a valid problem.
> is not a valid way to assess the information.
No, it is not on the public to have to cross reference hacker news posts, with tweets, with blogs posts, to figure out why we should care.
That is the job of the communicator. And if you communicate it poorly, then that is your failing.
If you care about why I think it's not worth continuing, and why I've come to this conclusion, I suggest you attempt to re-read what I wrote previously with a more open mind and instead of trying to drag it back into the specific argument. In any case, have a good evening.
The summary of that statement is "During that time, the chair of the board has more power than they usually would, and Amazon is chair of the board."
But once again, he is refusing to give the actual, moral punchline here.
If he wanted to convince people, he could explain all the dastardly things that he believes the board could do now. But he doesn't do that. All he says, is another statement that is devoid of moral argument, which is that "amazon is chair of the board" and that the board has more power.
The way to actually make an argument, is to not simply state facts. Instead you should say why people should care about these facts, and describe the actual material harm.
> , but I don't see a reason to continue my part in this conversation
Yes, I get it. When someone brings up the fact that basically everyone is pretty confused about the situation, and brings up how poorly this guy communicated, you have no response, and just want to assert you that you disagree, without backing it up.
No, you really can't. Just by including the other points in the discussion, but being unwilling to extrapolate on them, shows bad faith (perhaps unintentionally) on the part of Steve and compromises the entire discussion. The only reason you include some vague "Amazon did shady shit" in a tweet is to elicit an emotional response on the part of the reader and immediately biases the argument against Amazon. The argument is not based on merit; it never can be now, because it's been tainted. This is known as "poisoning the well" [0].
Even in this thread, commenters are saying how they implicitly trust Steve not because of the merits of his argument, but because of his personal brand. He's (again, perhaps unintentionally) taking advantage of that fact by mud-slinging at Amazon, priming readers to already be biased against Amazon, and then once called out on it the response is "oh just ignore the fact that I did that and look at this other argument which I promise is more substantive". That's not arguing in good faith.
I see all that Steve has done for Rust and I see him post here (and on reddit) a lot, so I have respect for him. But this "discussion" was brought up completely the wrong way by him, and any outcome is going to be tainted. It'd be best to just let this current discussion die, and bring it up again in the future in a more appropriate manner.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
That seems a bit strong. The statement was "won't go into rn (right now)".
> compromises the entire discussion.
It does. I'm not saying it causes no problems. I'm saying it shouldn't be grounds to immediately discount all other evidence given. It's perfectly valid as a modifier to another piece of evidence where you might use it to weight it, but I don't think it's valid to immediately ignore everything else said.
> The only reason you include some vague "Amazon did shady shit" in a tweet is to elicit an emotional response on the part of the reader and immediately biases the argument against Amazon.
No, that's one possible reason, it's not the only reason. Other possible reasons might be to signal other people more involved in the events in question that if they want to share their own story, perhaps now is the time and opening that makes that easier for them.
I agree that the presented argument would have been better without that statement, but that doesn't immediately negate the merit of what else is presented.
> The argument is not based on merit; it never can be now, because it's been tainted. This is known as "poisoning the well" [0].
The mistake you're making is in assuming that poisoning the well applies to and discredits non-dependent clauses. It should be easy to see how this applies when you consider the two statements "You should beware of John, he's made some threatening gestures to me and you in the past, and I there's been some assaults in the area" and "You should beware of John, he's threatening gestures to me and you in the past and multiple people have seen him assault three people recently." In one case it's used to imply guilt of something that is not factually proven or stated, in the other there's a fact to readily look into for confirmation that you can use as evidence to make up your own mind. That someone uses a call to emotion beforehand should not immediately discount that fact from consideration.
> Even in this thread, commenters are saying how they implicitly trust Steve not because of the merits of his argument, but because of his personal brand.
That's not what I've said, and not what I'm asking of you.
> But this "discussion" was brought up completely the wrong way by him, and any outcome is going to be tainted.
It may be tainted in some way. That doesn't mean easily verifiable facts should be ignored.
To be absolutely clear, since it seems very hard for some people to get my point, I have no qualms with your mistrusting him, or thinking his factual statements have no merit or are not problematic enough to act on. I just don't think it's valid to completely ignore the factual statements and refuse to consider them as you seemed to indicate you were doing because he also says "Amazon is being a meany in other ways too" and doesn't expound on it, and some other statements may not be as well supported as they could.
Edit: why I will not tweet about why I will not use rust.
Edit: why I do not understand why the Rust community is overzealous.
Edit: overzealous nerds are very annoying.
Oh, don't post this kind of personal attacks.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3633002/the-future-of-rust...
Steve is probably objecting to the paragraph that starts, "Given that Matsakis and Miller both work at AWS, it's not surprising that the [Rustacean] principles started out as a spin on Amazonian tenets."
> This sounds like the real concern
I actually think it distracts from their argument. Either say something or don 't. What purpose do vague accusations have here? Scare Amazon into behaving so not to get bad press? If the actions are concerning enough that Amazon should not have full-control, then why wouldn't those actions still not be pertinent if they do not define Rust.
Companies & languages, the only issue I am aware of is Oracle suing Google over the use of Java. Are they concern that Amazon will sue the users of Rust language?
It is always hard to imagine how this or that corporation might be at odds with what benefits a language user community. But it is not at all hard for any particular corporation to discover such differences, or to act on those discoveries where they can.
Their website contains only anodyne director bios and board meeting minutes. The minutes go up to May's meeting, with most of the content omitted under a "Private Session" heading.
AIUI the main need for a foundation was so they could own the Rust domain names and trademarks. Eight months later, I've seen no announcement on whether any progress has been made with this.
If contributors can’t tolerate corporate sponsorship, then there is an abundance of languages with little to no commercial interest, especially those of academic origins.
It is well maintained and high performance :)
* “Reliable: If it compiles, it works.”
* “Performant: Idiomatic code runs efficiently.”
* “Supportive: The language, tools, and community are here to help.”
* “Productive: A little effort does a lot of work.”
* “Transparent: You can predict and control low-level details.”
* “Versatile: You can do anything with Rust.”
I don't really see what the problem is. They aren't particularly Amazonian principles, and they all seem like good things to strive for.
My biggest complaint would be having Amazonians having control over feature roadmap and code acceptance. Amazon's priorities very often are in direct conflict with literally everyone else's priorities. Not to mention the fact that I've seen a lot of code at Amazon, know how nightmarish it is, and can reasonably infer that the internal politics at Amazon do not allow for, and often penalize, quality code. It is not at all unthinkable that some department with stupid priorities and lots of political clout pushes through some half-baked shit bonanza that will bite everyone else in the ass. That is a problem.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc
[1] https://vimeo.com/230142234
However, "if it compiles, it works" is a bit more in line with Rust's unique ambitions. The rest are quite generic.
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/blog-post-rustacean-princi...
Hey Bryan, next time you fund a bunch of criminals to loot and burn down Emeryville - I hope they burn down Oxide Computing as well.
How to Rustacean
Be kind and considerate
Bring joy to the user
Show up
Recognize others’ knowledge
Start somewhere
Follow through
Pay it forward
Trust and delegate
I am completely willing to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt, and let them be involved in the Rust foundation as they see fit.
The great thing about open source, is that the code is open source. If enough developers don't like the way stuff is being handled, they are free to fork.
,,they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.''
Maybe Steve (and other Rust team members) should adopt openness and stop making deals in private. That's not how open communities are built.
I was also vague about other things because they're secondary concerns to the main one. If Amazon stops trying to be in total control of Rust, I'll be happy.
Yes, it typically is. However making non-falsifiable public accusations that individuals are doing "dirty shit" is not keeping things "private" and is even worse than making a concrete public statement about a concern you may have.
To summarize:
* Amazon has too much administrative influence
* Amazon has marginalized the core team
* also un-stated dirty tricks by Amazon
I think rust is great, and I love with the rust community has accomplished, and I wouldn't want to see Amazon break that. But from this thread I don't know enough to raise objections. It sounds like a Rust foundation governance issue, the sort of thing that comes up from time-to-time on most big successful projects.
[edited to fix formatting]
I'm also confused. The Tweet thread switches between Amazon and Rust Foundation almost interchangeably. Is the implication that Amazon has co-opted the Rust foundation? Are the other Rust Foundation members being sidelined? Or is this a deeper objection about the existence of a corporate-sponsored Rust Foundation?
I'm also confused by the claims that "Amazon has decided not to have a Rust Foundation ED" when the Rust Foundation is in the midst of an Executive Director search: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-06-25-announcing...
I am not a member of the foundation and so can't really speak to what is being spent currently. As far as I know a public budget has not been posted.
The risk is that they can set the direction to anything. They might be amazing stewards, they might spend it all on useless things. We don't yet know. I do know that many of the folks in the foundation have their hearts in the right place.
Again, the theme isn't about specific actions, it is about consolidation of control.
If you find a time when you feel your head is clear enough to write a detailed summary I'm sure many others would benefit from reading it as well. It's probably important to ensure that anything like this is written when your emotions are extremely well-managed, and also important to run it by many of the coolest, most-level headed colleagues that you trust -- and heavily weight their revisions.
I also congratulate the Rust team on getting to a point where they've made something valuable enough that worrying about regressive corporate influence is even warranted. I really do owe Rustaceans a large thanks for building something I enjoy so much.
Hopefully Rust can grow in a healthy way with generous corporate support, and find the guardrails necessary to mitigate the usual negative consequences that come along with the benefits.
>Again, specifically: what control are you worried about? I suspect that you think the foundation has powers it does not have. [0]
These statements seem somewhat contradictory to me. Did something changed in the last few months?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126077
(I also thought they were saying the foundation was exerting control over the language, which is incorrect, strictly speaking. The foundation has no formal powers over the language itself.)
--- cut here ---
sorry, the tweet length got me here!
they have temporarily forgone an ED. that is, they deliberately did not retain the existing temporary ED while this process went on
Bingo.
https://postgresql.fund/blog/is-it-time-to-modernize-postgre...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512274
https://postgresql.fund/blog/postgres-core-team-attacks-post...
Which... I find it hard to imagine a random selection of individuals, the majority of which wouldn't be susceptible to that. Everyone has to eat, and there are always catastrophes in business eventually.
This year they changed their bylaws to say that no more than a quarter of the directors may share an affiliation.
https://github.com/VanL/psf-bylaws/compare/9666a3a397c30fa7c...
(As far as I can make out, previously they just said that directors had to make their affiliation publicly known.)
If Amazon would be in the drivers' seat, that incentive structure would seem much less clear.
Amazon has enough money (and no moral or ethics) to take Rust and twist the reality to make people believe Amazon is right and Rust community is wrong.
Let's watch the show.
But will Google let Go rust away?
I'd pretty much prefer that none of those companies have any role in defining Rust – but, instead, they seem to be about the only ones who do.
However, with the exception of some communication missteps around the licensing changes (which actually ended up in fully open source JDK, as opposed to the mostly open source JDK in Sun's time), Java has actually done great under Oracle.
Amazing what having resources can do for a project, eh?
I mean, I'm not thrilled with the licensing model around GraalVM (since it's another "mostly" open source situation), but business is business, I guess. I'd personally prefer that they treat it the same as Java proper, and fund it via support contracts/subscriptions.
The people they send to meetings on a regular basis do a great deal of important work, and they often disagree among themselves. But sometimes marching orders evidently come down.
There was a recent concerted effort to define a process to determine when and where backward ABI compatibility should be abandoned, which would have made it much easier to bring about such occasions.
Maintaining a list of individually unobjectionable principles seems innocuous, but it is via the principles omitted from the list being thereby made harder to appeal to that you can get bad results. And, the more there are, the easier it is to reject this or that request.
However independently reading those documents from Amazon I felt "God, Rust seems more corporate language then even Go, Java or Swift."
He was also personally involved in the riots last summer that burnt down every major city and killed at least 36 different people.
Fuck Steve.