I think Steve has a well earned reputation for being decent and trustworthy.
I can understand the desire here for more details so that others can come to a firmer conclusion but try to put yourself in Steve's shoes. It is very hard to publicly criticize some of the behavior of a group you are a member of without burning bridges or deeply harming relationships. At the same time, saying nothing publicly is read as tacit approval.
I interpret the article as a giving Amazon credit for why people like Rust, and Steve's response as a public disagreement saying that such credit is unwarranted and gives Amazon more power than it should have over Rust's future direction.
Not sure if that will go well since it is people at Amazon that will insert themselves here and you get corporate governance.
Not really sure I am convinced on the result of languages and frameworks managed by big tech, although I believe Amazon to perhaps be the better players among them.
> but try to put yourself in Steve's shoes. It is very hard to publicly criticize some of the behavior of a group you are a member of without burning bridges or deeply harming relationships.
Your interpretation of "a group you are a member of" as referring to formal membership in the Rust Foundation specifically, rather than membership in the Rust community generally* seems like it gets at one of the issues in dispute, namely, whether there is an effort by corporate participants in the RF to (re)define what Rust is.
(*): "community membership" is necessarily somewhat nebulous, but Steve is, undeniably, a member of the Rust community.
Reminds me of the recurring debates we had (and have!) in KDE about the right way to structure decision making from the development community and the KDE e.V.
> Your interpretation of "a group you are a member of" as referring to formal membership in the Rust Foundation specifically, rather than membership in the Rust community generally
The linked Tweet thread is specifically directed at the Rust Foundation, not the general Rust community.
Steve Klabnik is obviously a member of the Rust community.
It is not currently an option, as far as I know. That said as a member of project leadership I would be eligible to run for various positions and be one, but I did not.
Well that's interesting. It looks like the Linux Foundation all over again and its very surprising to see how one could not for-see that such issues like this would happen.
After reading the comments, I think that this one [0] even directly shared the same structure concerns [1] you are bringing up and not giving companies like Amazon too much control.
How is this a Linux Foundation issue? The LF usually has board seats reserved for folks who are maintainers, committers and so on, essentially represents all the interests in the community.
Don't put this on the LF, this is definitely on the folks who bootstrapped the foundation and setup the governance in the way they did.
He didn't say it WAS a Linux Foundation issue, he said it was LIKE the Linux Foundation. I'm assuming there was some Linux Foundation drama in the past he is specifically referencing that this mirrors. I'm not familiar enough with either group to narrow things down further.
>The Foundation shall have five classes of membership: Platinum Members, Gold Members, Silver Members, Associate Members, and Individual Members.
At the same time though, there doesn't seem to be a general way for becoming one now:
>The Individual Members of the Foundation shall initially be the members of the Core Team, as defined in Section 5.5(b) below, and may be extended to other individual maintainers of the Projects and subject to any other qualifications as may from time to time be established by the Board.
I think it's even simpler than that: Rust was a Mozilla project from inception, and suddenly in 2020 it wasn't because Mozilla made all their Rust engineers redundant.
The Rust Foundation lost its main sponsor, because Mozilla pulled out... that's a spectacular betrayal. Amazon comes in with a better offer to support the language. Why say no?
Klabnik doesn't like it, but the simple and sad truth is that Mozilla abandoned Rust.
edit: this post was pure speculation and I was corrected by Steve Klabnik in a reply :)
I can understand the desire here for more details so that others can come to a firmer conclusion but try to put yourself in Steve's shoes. It is very hard to publicly criticize some of the behavior of a group you are a member of without burning bridges or deeply harming relationships. At the same time, saying nothing publicly is read as tacit approval.
I interpret the article as a giving Amazon credit for why people like Rust, and Steve's response as a public disagreement saying that such credit is unwarranted and gives Amazon more power than it should have over Rust's future direction.