Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation
developers.facebook.com
developers.facebook.com
It looks like some people are worried about Facebook's influence on Rust, but that doesn't seem like a huge concern to me. Facebook isn't going to want to influence Rust in any particularly "Facebooky" way since it's such a deep-in-the-infrastructure component. They will just have the same concerns that many other large tech companies have, like, can you use it successfully in an environment that has a zillion engineers and a zillion other programming languages to interoperate with. It's important for Rust to be nice to use at both big and small companies so that's a good sort of voice to have in the foundation.
Finally? It took them almost two decades!
But I'm not sure what there is to be done about that, and it isn't limited to Rust (or Facebook for that matter), and I don't think this event really makes that state of affairs worse in any particular way. It just remains an uncomfortable and (seemingly) unavoidable fact of our industry.
I don’t think we will stop evil corporations by preventing them from using memory safe and performant programming languages.
More technology has generally been better, but not in all cases and it's not guaranteed to continue that way.
Bitcoin is cool, but the consequence is using a lot of energy and facilitating a lot of extortion. Open source seems great, but it also facilitated the rise of AWS which effectively locks people out of software more than closed source software ever did.
We already know the rationalizations, we tell themselves to ourselves every day. But remembering the costs is healthy.
Very early on Rust was made independent of Mozilla. And since the layoffs it's hard to argue they had much indirect influence left even before the Foundation was started. Well, no more than other companies using Rust.
Basically Google, MS, Facebook, and probably loads of others are using Rust in their mutual tech stacks. They have a shared interest. none of them get to dominate. The Rust foundation is the neutral ground where they collaborate. Schoolbook use of open source as a means to collaborate between frenemies.
This will get downvoted into oblivion. But complaining (over and over) about how certain companies do "terrible things", or how RMS shouldn't be allowed on the FSF board, or Github/ICE, or Amazon predatory behavior against employees wanting to unionize, but then _not_ call this out and pretend it's fine ... is peak hypocrisy.
It seems there are a few new silver members as well.
https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-introducin...
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45449938
Edit: I realized I'm slowly getting into Deno, which is based on Rust, so I should probably just lean into Rust.
Meet with the PSF Board of Directors Opportunity to meet with the PSF Board of Directors to discuss a topic of your choosing. The health and sustainability of our community is important to many organizations and we want to make sure community needs are heard and noted.
For visionary sponsors:
Meet with the Python Steering Council Opportunity to meet with the Steering Council to discuss technical aspects of Python or feedback you may have, or just a Q&A with the Steering Council. The health and sustainability of Python is critical to many organizations and we want to make sure community needs are heard and noted.
"Buy yourself into an obedient hiring pool controlled by the Steering Council."
Thinking that infrastructure engineers have direct influence over the product is wrong. Instead they work at Facebook because it is a good means to being paid lots of money to contribute to open source.
Btw, getting out of us vs. them mentality will form a healthier community and result in more positive changes. You can call Facebook on shit without generalizing against the employees who work there.
I disagree. It's this behavior and lack of disinfectant (sunlight) that allows companies to get away with the amount of crimes against humanity they do. Saying "Tech" isn't political, or "I'm just an engineer somebody else is in charge" is how horror happens.
What I am saying, is that you should not generalize people just because they worked or currently work at a big tech company. This is as much a cognitive bias as thinking a company like Facebook only does good.
You have no clue why they work there, what they work on, or who they are.
As someone who already views the Facebook brand as a toxic waste dump this won't do anything to change my mind.
If they want to sponsor Rust more power to them. It's not as if it's going to change anything for the average user.
1. If the sponsor is a software vendor, does the funding enable them to secure a marketplace advantage over competing vendors? For example do they gain a majority on a steering committee, or fund a critical mass of foundation-employed developers?
2. Does the funding enable the sponsor to unduly influence an official or de facto standard which impacts a marketplace outside of software? (For example, web protocols: see https://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html#why-free )
I think you've properly identified "good will and the dependence on funding" as sources of potential undue influence. The structure of the foundation is supposed to guard against that. But more to the point, it's hard to imagine how Facebook would be able to leverage undue influence over the Rust Foundation: they aren't competing against Rust vendors, and it's unclear what public standards could be subverted via the Rust Foundation in a way which could benefit Facebook.
« The Rust Core Team believes that tech is and always will be political, and we encourage everyone take the time today to learn about [US-centered political issue of the day] »
I suppose this makes it less likely that Facebook finds themselves being the issue of the day.
Say what you want, but the problem here is that you don't need to give board seats to those who have tons of cash, rather instead have them sponsor it, like how the R foundation has done.
Facebook essentially bought a board seat to drive and prioritise which features they want in the development of Rust.
The wolf eats the same grass as the sheep and gets praise for it.
The foundation is not involved in feature development, so this doesn't make a ton of sense.
it doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money on a seat and not do anything. I am sure facebook has other motives than paying engineers to work on rust.
a regular sponsorship would have a been more enough in this case.
The foundation's stated mission is to steward the intellectual property of the Rust project, and assist it and its maintainers. That often means things like "paying for legal support" and "paying for CI" and such.
The Rust project is the thing that's existed for years, and makes all of the decisions about what happens to Rust technically. The foundation has no position in that hierarchy, and sponsoring the foundation does not get you a seat on the teams that accept RFCs.
> a regular sponsorship would have a been more enough in this case.
I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing here between "regular" and not. Maybe that they would only want a lower tier sponsorship? I don't know, you'd have to ask them.
Seems lots of people left Mozilla.
[0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-worl...
It seems they just want some influence and use it as a hiring bait.
After having been hired, you'll be asked to work on a legacy C++ code base.
Same for projects other than programming languages, e.g. Linux.
I don't feel comfortable with corporate-driven FOSS. I'll stick with community languages.
As for Perl, I just look at it as a stepping stone for more modern scripting languages.
The concern comes from having a *small* number of companies with a notoriously aggressive behavior controlling a project.
Google is especially known for using products as weapons against competitors and drop them suddenly after a while.
I was just adding context to the other comment with my own. I've no qualms with whomever spending money on whatever language they choose.
Unless it's VB. Yuck.
I'd definitely prefer oil and gas companies that offset carbon emissions over oil and gas companies that don't. (Not going into how much pr that is over how much it's actually worth anything)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not...
Also, practically, we do not have a CLA, and have had just under six thousand distinct contributors. We cannot unilaterally change the license. This is a feature, not a bug.
Real life isn’t kindergarten, world isn’t black and white. Even for things that most of people can agree are good, you’ll have negative externalities.
You could make it very explicit: X shall not be used for advertising purposes. In legalese, of course, so a judge knows what is meant.
Is only serving ads or also using ads not allowed?
Given that almost every single company in the world is using advertising then it becomes a hobbyist tool.
With serving - how about if I have a page/app that includes ads served by third party (like most of the world does). Does it make it also off limits?
Statements like that sound pretty cool, but ignore real world complexity.
Also, who decides what is "good", and what is "evil"? For proper licensing terms, a judge can decide whether those terms have been violated within a given jurisdiction. Would you have philosophers take their place? What a bunch of nonsense.
Huh, Rust developers have plenty of opinions about "good" and "evil" on everything under sun. They peddle it non-stop on social media. So they seem perfectly capable to decide on that.
Similarly, since Facebook isn't a software vendor, the kinds of things that you might achieve by securing undue influence within the Rust Foundation don't really benefit them.
(I work at Facebook on a team that uses Rust)
It seems entirely possible that, even putting aside the PR, they're concerned about making sure a robust modern systems language stays around/thvives so that they have a robust modern systems language to use.
EDIT: oh, they've also published another post detailing their history with Rust. Lots of very interesting things in here! https://engineering.fb.com/2021/04/29/developer-tools/rust/