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.
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:
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-lang.org/t/announcement-ashley-willia...
Ashley also abused her moderator powers to ban dakom, even though he had done nothing wrong:
https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/914
https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/928
She also made numerous lies in those two threads (such as claiming that the Rust Wasm Core team is "random people without organization", the Rust Wasm Core team is hand-picked, they are the official leaders of Rust Wasm).
She acted incredibly disrespectful toward the Rust Wasm team (who worked very hard to make Rust work on Wasm), even though she had contributed basically nothing.
There is a dark side to Rust, which everybody is afraid to talk about. Anybody who tries to discuss things is censored by the Rust Core team. That's why I stopped contributing to Rust and I will never go back.
“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...