JeanHeyd Meneide's response to “Why I left Rust”
pony.social
pony.social
> as evidenced by much of the public statements from existing, ex, and now-ex Rust Project members, the decision to unilaterally downgrade was not known to many of them until they read my post.
> Downgrading the keynote was NEVER voted on like inviting me to do the keynote in the first place.
If this is true, some mystical creature behind the scenes is pulling the strings somehow, and keeping in mind the whole Rust Foundation vs. Rust Project debacles of the past, and the fact that JT (who was the person proposing a new leadership model RFC for Rust...)... then I am kind of left with the question of when, not if, we will see a major community fork of Rust
What a mess. I wish people could just focus on the tech and drop their egos and all the drama.
It's already happened. https://crablang.org/
At first I thought it was a joke, but now I'm not so sure
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27309412/what-is-the-dif...
There are loads of forks that happen due to disagreements in organisation.
> Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the techniques adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5 would lead to poor performance and maintenance problems. He sought to correct these anticipated problems within the FreeBSD project. Due to conflicts with other FreeBSD developers over the implementation of his ideas, his ability to directly change the codebase was eventually revoked.
Do SQL dialects in Databases count? mariadb
Bit of a nitpick, but I think you meant NetBSD/OpenBSD? AFAIK both FreeBSD and NetBSD independently continued the abandoned 386BSD project, but there was never any strong relation between the two projects (they did share code later on). OpenBSD did split from NetBSD, after Theo de Raadt was removed.
Other examples: FreeBSD/DragonFlyBSD, Vim/NeoVim, Mplayer/mpv, (Open)Solaris/illumos, MySQL/MariaDB, probably some more.
It's also not completely banal. Designing durable non-profits, governance structures, decision-making processes, policies, etc. is quite complex. You can to some extend evaluate your success by how much public drama you get to avoid. :-) That makes it a case study of interest.
(I've helped run one of the major FOSS orgs for about a decade or so.)
Also, the standards work is only a portion of C++ language evolution. Clang RFCs are public and anyone can provide feedback, the GCC mailing list is public, and both of their issue trackers (which include feature requests) are public.
There's nothing here but some beef between PhD and a yet-unknown member of rust leadership. This is high school stuff, the wider community should not elevate this or read these tea leaves.
Who cares
That rust leadership person is a dickhead. Great. End of story. Sometimes in life people are dicks, they eat your sandwich from the employee fridge even though it was clearly labeled as yours. That makes that individual a jerk, not the wider organization an Evil Empire.
> Who cares
A: Obviously enough people to make this a rather lively HN discussion. And to make it somewhat prominent news in the tech sphere in general. So, quite a lot of people.
Which makes one wonder why exactly you are repeatedly trying to minimise it with this dismissive “who cares”? One can't help but wonder if it is because you have some personal stake here that you don't want people scrutinizing too thoroughly.
That... is a problem.
It doesn't matter, it's completely irrelevant to the wider technical community. We'll never know and we shouldn't want to. This shouldn't have escalated past some emails about "what gives", but because some of the people involved have two speed grievance meters (none and crisis) we get to watch this soap opera play out.
Rust leadership person is probably a dickhead, great, lots of people are dickheads. I hope their friends say mean things about them when they leave the table at group lunches.
> Rust leadership person is probably a dickhead, great, lots of people are dickheads.
The point is, Rust isn't supposed to have a “leadership person”; it's supposed to be run by a group of people. The fact that some (as you so correctly conclude) dickhead is able to circumvent that, and in effect usurp de facto leadership (at least on this issue), shows that Rust’s leadership process isn't working as it is supposed to.
It's hard to conceive of how extremely narrow a view one must take on this “soap opera”, in order not to see that what it shows is actually a pretty big deal. Squinting really hard, aren't ya?
A languages thrives when enough talented people are developing it further. We are seeing some of that talent going away because of these kinds of drama.
Everyone has seen enough committees that run projects in a dictatorial style while hiding behind a CoC.
We don't know what is the case here, but it is useful information for anyone who thought about contributing.
People care less about drama that inside info.
Because it sets the tone of discussion and contribution, the amount of respect contributors get, and the kind of behind the scene games played.
>So much drama about a guys talk getting downgraded?
Yes, because it sets the tone of discussion and contribution, the amount of respect contributors get, and the kind of behind the scene games played.
Perhaps it needs to happen to some personally before they can see it as the insult and unfair back-stabbing that it is.
Rust is supposed to be run by a committee or group of some sort, apparently called “Rust Leadership” something. This ostensible Leadership had approved the keynote as such. Then some individual(s?) went behind the committee's back and un-keynoted it. That they did this – that they were even able to do it – shows that they're the actual leaders of the Rust project, not the committee that is claimed to be.
Not being able to see that that's a pretty big deal is... Weird, to say the least. Feels like one would have to work pretty hard at not wanting to see it.
one gets the feeling that people participate in these "communities" for purely social posturing reasons, wholly unrelated to making things with computers, while still retaining the veneer of "being part of and participating in a programming language community", and that just doesn't sit right with me.
one also gets the feeling that, when some fresh drama like this happens, each of these blog posts and responses and whatnot is not-so-secretly a form of opportunistic self-aggrandizing grift.
when one of these "communities" attracts a critical mass of social-posturing drama like this, it's just too easy for an outsider like myself to say, "nah, I'm good, thanks"—and if the goal of the "community" is to make the best programming language possible, surely this must similarly dissuade others who would otherwise be down to spend countless hours actually working on the thing and making it good.
there's good lessons to be learned here all around for anyone aspiring to create a productive "community" around something like a new programming language—take heed!
I think that's why having more corporate involvement is probably good for these kind of orgs. Corporate types value stability because the code needs to work and be maintained long term.
A ton of the people raising issues are being way too vague about it. Throw. Them. Under. The. God. Damn. Bus. Already.
I assure you it is simple to do and it will come to a head sooner, instead of dragging out the teen drama in perpetuity.
FWIW it sounds genuine to me.
Keynote speech was downgraded to normal speech at a late date, allegedly overriding a democratic decision.
Fred flounces off dramatically in response to the downgrading and posts a long rambling blog about it and tweets.
Joe resigns in support announcing it in a response to the tweet.
Joe then posts his reasons with a long rambling blog alleging political shenanigans behind the downgrading.
More discussion ongoing on various media.
Names may have been changed here.
Basically though, alleged politics and possible ego issues on either or both sides - with probably poor comms in the best case - centred here on a conference speaker.
Bear in mind that this is also in the context of Rust which has a history of these sorts of shenanigans.
But yeah, perhaps I shouldn't have been so glib in making a private reflection public; apologies if anybody involved is reading the thread.
Yeah, because "overriding a democratic decision" behind the scenes to backstab someone is a small thing in a project...
(Nor was it Fred)
Fast forward and the conf organisers advise him that his keynote has been "demoted" to a regular talk. He says this is unprofessional and a lack of respect, cancels his talks, and posts about it. One of the people in the core team (I think?) quit in protest because of how this all happened behind the scenes. This particular post is JeanHeyd's comments on JT's explaining why he quit.
You missed the part where this demoting happened behind the scenes, was not voted for by the team, the suggestion to downvote didn't even reach the team, because some shady person did it on their own, and it was communicated to JeanHeyd himself at the last minute (so that he could check with the team and bring it to their awareness either).
So, kind of missing the whole point, and painting a bad picture of JeanHeyd to boot...
Ultimately, I don't even think the shady behind the scenes stuff is the part we should focus on.They invited him to give the keynote, he advised them that it might be a problem, they specifically told him it was fine, and then dropped the keynote for precisely the reasons he said it might be a problem. That is extremely disrespectful and unprofessional by any reasonable standard.
Who?
IMO record a keynote and put it out on the day of the conference.
And the threat of a fork is politics again
This is really just another day of the self-canabalization of Rust and its Foundation and the language so-called 'community' continues to have more ridiculous tantrums and melodrama over the tiniest of all things.
Yet another first world issue of pointless pantomimes which can only be found in Rust.