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Is there a company behind Rust? Do developers who contribute to the project receive at least market rate salary? I can't help but think that this kind of model

Is there a company behind Rust? Do developers who contribute to the project receive at least market rate salary? I can't help but think that this kind of model where a group of volunteers creates something of huge value for big corporations for free and then corporation takes it and use in their multi-billion projects and mostly pay in exposure, is a con to weasel out of paying salaries, royalties, taxes by those big corporations. They promote open source so that they don't have to allocate budgets for R&D, because there is always going to be a group to fall for open source PR and will do the heavy lifting for free. Then once the project matures enough, some execs will feel guilty that they use something they didn't pay for and built another beach house and got another jet and they will announce they'll commit some of their company resources to "help", but in reality this is just another PR piece. A lot of people fall for that because they think if they have a great "open source" project in their resume, then somehow one of the big companies will hire them and maybe this will change their modest lives and they'll finally taste middle class living. But that rarely happens. I think developers should unionise and start demand that those big companies will pay royalties for using "open source" code.

nicoburns 6y ago
Its development was originally sponsored by Mozilla. But they recently laid off most the Rust team. However, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon now all have Rust teams employing core developers.
- varispeed 6y ago
  I think all contributors should be paid once a big company starts using the project. The current state of play in my view is unethical. Developers do the hard work in hope they will be hired some day in the future and that not always happens and they won't be reimbursed for their time spent prior to being hired. In many cases these projects are also developed by privileged developers who can afford to work without pay because they have wealthy parents and so on. This indirectly creates a disadvantage for people from poor backgrounds as in the open source world you are expected to work for free and people who cannot afford to do that are excluded.
  - steveklabnik 6y ago
    Rust has had almost six thousand unique contributors, with about 300 to 350 contributing to any given release these days. And that only counts commits landed in rust-lang/rust, none of our other repos, or non-commit contrutbions. Rust is larger than a lot of companies, at this point. That being said, you’re not wrong that people deserve to be paid for their work, and the foundation was created in part to help work on this topic, to help the project pay bills and encourage employment, but I’m not aware of many, if any, open source projects as large as ours where everyone or even the majority is paid.
    - varispeed 6y ago
      Companies that use this software have billions at their disposal (often through creative accounting), and there is no excuse to not pay. Perhaps this could be based on % of the company revenue and then split similarly how artists are being paid their royalties. I think there is an opportunity for some big companies to redeem themselves and create such system and amend licenses so that it is ensured all developers are paid if company that is using the projects has revenue above certain threshold. Ideally this could be included in Github and other platforms on a opt-in basis (for developers), but in the future it should be enshrined in law. I'll vote for any party that will look into exploitation of developers.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > I think all contributors should be paid once a big company starts using the project. Wait, why would we want to deter big companies from using and supporting Rust? That makes no sense to me. This pervasive big-company-envy is something that I just can't grok here at HN.
    - varispeed 6y ago
      For me it is not only about Rust but any open-source software. Companies essentially get labour for free and they don't have to commit their own resources to take on employees and they don't pay salaries and tax. This creates advantage for privileged developers who can work for free and "show off" and there are less jobs for developers from poorer backgrounds as there is nothing like Rust to develop, because companies can just snatch an open source project. Do you not think this is weird that these companies have billions and billions of cash lying around and developers who helped them make that money probably still live in a rental shoebox?
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  (They laid off the team that they employed, which was not “most of the Rust team.”)
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Yes sorry, most of their rust team would have been more accurate.

nicoburns 6y ago

Its development was originally sponsored by Mozilla. But they recently laid off most the Rust team. However, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon now all have Rust teams employing core developers.

varispeed 6y ago
I think all contributors should be paid once a big company starts using the project. The current state of play in my view is unethical. Developers do the hard work in hope they will be hired some day in the future and that not always happens and they won't be reimbursed for their time spent prior to being hired. In many cases these projects are also developed by privileged developers who can afford to work without pay because they have wealthy parents and so on. This indirectly creates a disadvantage for people from poor backgrounds as in the open source world you are expected to work for free and people who cannot afford to do that are excluded.
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  Rust has had almost six thousand unique contributors, with about 300 to 350 contributing to any given release these days. And that only counts commits landed in rust-lang/rust, none of our other repos, or non-commit contrutbions. Rust is larger than a lot of companies, at this point. That being said, you’re not wrong that people deserve to be paid for their work, and the foundation was created in part to help work on this topic, to help the project pay bills and encourage employment, but I’m not aware of many, if any, open source projects as large as ours where everyone or even the majority is paid.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Companies that use this software have billions at their disposal (often through creative accounting), and there is no excuse to not pay. Perhaps this could be based on % of the company revenue and then split similarly how artists are being paid their royalties. I think there is an opportunity for some big companies to redeem themselves and create such system and amend licenses so that it is ensured all developers are paid if company that is using the projects has revenue above certain threshold. Ideally this could be included in Github and other platforms on a opt-in basis (for developers), but in the future it should be enshrined in law. I'll vote for any party that will look into exploitation of developers.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > I think all contributors should be paid once a big company starts using the project. Wait, why would we want to deter big companies from using and supporting Rust? That makes no sense to me. This pervasive big-company-envy is something that I just can't grok here at HN.
  - varispeed 6y ago
    For me it is not only about Rust but any open-source software. Companies essentially get labour for free and they don't have to commit their own resources to take on employees and they don't pay salaries and tax. This creates advantage for privileged developers who can work for free and "show off" and there are less jobs for developers from poorer backgrounds as there is nothing like Rust to develop, because companies can just snatch an open source project. Do you not think this is weird that these companies have billions and billions of cash lying around and developers who helped them make that money probably still live in a rental shoebox?
steveklabnik 6y ago
(They laid off the team that they employed, which was not “most of the Rust team.”)
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Yes sorry, most of their rust team would have been more accurate.