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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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.

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