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Comment by jdblair | Hacker News Reader

The facts are pretty thin here, but this seems to be the core tweet: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1437441118745071617

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]

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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).

https://postgresql.fund/blog/is-it-time-to-modernize-postgre...

That's a decent balacing mechanism as a starting base. Your link raises interesting points though.

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512274

Charming. Just grabbed the first link that described the issue. But yeah, the Spanish organization seems... confused at best regarding its own role.

Here is the full response from Álvaro Hernández at Fundación PostgreSQL:

https://postgresql.fund/blog/postgres-core-team-attacks-post...

Honestly that's also sort of a sad statement on the current state of affairs as far as corporate consolidation goes these days.

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.

The Python Software Foundation has also been addressing this issue recently.

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.)

> 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?

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...

On that last bit, I elaborated on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513656

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.

Can you elaborate on what the money is currently used for and what the risk here is? Is Amazon attempting to move more Rust infrastructure to AWS?

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.

>just pointing out that a single organization controls a lot, more than most people probably realize.

>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 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.

The ED detail buried in this tweet: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1437450014507376649

--- 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

What is "ED" in this context?

Executive Director.

after reading around a bit I think it means "executive director" (not super familiar with this matter)

I think executive director.

See Steve’s comments here, which clarifies why cutting the executive director (ED) is a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513656

> Is the implication that Amazon has co-opted the Rust foundation?

Bingo.

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.

This is concerning to say the least.

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