8 ms·

Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation

180 points by wongmjane 5y ago

nanna 5y ago
Well, that makes me a tad less enthusiastic about Rust.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  It had to happen, the only way to make a programming language successful is to have it backed by most big tech companies.
  - wallacoloo 5y ago
    They can contribute without having any special status. Rust already has a robust RFC process and good technical leadership. My worry is that these things weaken and rust very gradually becomes your typical corporate software product where more and more independent features are just bolted on without care to any larger vision. That won’t happen if FB, etc keep contributing as ordinary contributors. But it could happen if they’re elevated to a position of leadership.
    - steveklabnik 5y ago
      Note that the Foundation doesn't have any impact on the RFC process or the project's structure or governance, so while that worry may exist, this announcement isn't a path towards doing that.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Python, C, C++, Perl, Bash were pretty successful before the modern FAANG culture. Same for projects other than programming languages, e.g. Linux. I don't feel comfortable with corporate-driven FOSS. I'll stick with community languages.
    - xiphias2 5y ago
      As for C, sure, AT&T is so much better than FAANG. C++ was also heavyly corporate. Python won over Ruby because of FAANG support (I personally like Ruby more, but as it's not supported by big companies, it remained behind in deep learning for example). Also NVIDIA has great Python support, which is really important for high performance software development. As for Perl, I just look at it as a stepping stone for more modern scripting languages.
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        A lot of companies also contributed to Linux, but that's not the issue. The concern comes from having a *small* number of companies with a notoriously aggressive behavior controlling a project. Google is especially known for using products as weapons against competitors and drop them suddenly after a while.
        xiphias2 5y ago
        Sure tying Rust development cycle to Azure+VS code, AWS or GCP would be quite bad (run rust-analyzer on Azure for example). At least Facebook doesn't have this kind of infrastructure yet.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    I wouldn’t say so. A language like Haskell is successful, even if their motto is “avoid success at all costs.” Books have been written about the language, and the ecosystem and community are thriving. Even still, few corporate sponsors exist.
- brink 5y ago
  Starting with the next version; when you compile, you will see a facebook ad.
  - benatkin 5y ago
    "rustc" is the facebook ad. They've linked themselves to the name.
- ryan93 5y ago
  I doubt Zuckerberg will be personally involved. It will be all engineers.
  - geodel 5y ago
    Exactly right. After all engineers are just working for salary, eating free meals, cashing their RSUs. They have no clue or hand in how Facebook makes money today. Moreover they promise to learn about FB's business and write a strongly worded letter on "Why I left Facebook" when leaving after vesting most of company stocks
- serverholic 5y ago
  Why? Facebook engineering is highly regarded.
  - adenozine 5y ago
    Perhaps in capability, not so much by reputation or social utility.
    - brian_herman 5y ago
      True but if someone would pay you 200k to develop rust things wouldn’t you say yes?
      - vaylian 5y ago
        I would not say yes. You can't buy ethics.
      - adenozine 5y ago
        Sure! I was just adding context to the other comment with my own. I've no qualms with whomever spending money on whatever language they choose. Unless it's VB. Yuck.
    - door101 5y ago
      If the Rust foundation only took money from morally upright tech companies, it would be bankrupt.
      - adenozine 5y ago
        I agree, I was only meaning to add context to that other comment.
- Isn0gud 5y ago
  Why? On the tech side, engineers at facebook have contributed some great open source work.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Just like how every environmentalist love the oil and gas companies because they are offsetting their carbon emissions
    - Isn0gud 5y ago
      How does this comparison make any sense? I'd definitely prefer oil and gas companies that offset carbon emissions over oil and gas companies that don't. (Not going into how much pr that is over how much it's actually worth anything)
- amelius 5y ago
  Rust should include in their license: "The Software/Language shall be used for Good, not Evil" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not_Evil%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not...
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Since that line could be interpreted as just "The Software/Language shall be used for Good", any software that is not explicitly "Good" would be forbidden to use Rust, effectively making Rust useless in 90% of companies.
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    Core team member here. There's no desire to change the license. Also, practically, we do not have a CLA, and have had just under six thousand distinct contributors. We cannot unilaterally change the license. This is a feature, not a bug.
  - justapassenger 5y ago
    Who decides what’s good and what’s evil? Real life isn’t kindergarten, world isn’t black and white. Even for things that most of people can agree are good, you’ll have negative externalities.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - amelius 5y ago
      It was just a suggestion without the details carved out. You could make it very explicit: X shall not be used for advertising purposes. In legalese, of course, so a judge knows what is meant.
      - justapassenger 5y ago
        Define advertising purpose. Rust affiliated organizations are advertising (for example conferences are being advertised). Is only serving ads or also using ads not allowed? Given that almost every single company in the world is using advertising then it becomes a hobbyist tool. With serving - how about if I have a page/app that includes ads served by third party (like most of the world does). Does it make it also off limits? Statements like that sound pretty cool, but ignore real world complexity.
- mbStavola 5y ago
  This is what adoption and maturity looks like. As the language starts to see serious use, you see companies start to consider the language's future and direction.
- rectang 5y ago
  The kinds of things that Facebook most often receives flak for would be difficult to pursue though the layer of indirection that is sponsoring a foundation dedicated to the Rust programming language. Similarly, since Facebook isn't a software vendor, the kinds of things that you might achieve by securing undue influence within the Rust Foundation don't really benefit them.
  - brabel 5y ago
    But what's in it for Facebook then? They're spending real money, there's got to be something for them to benefit from?
    - benatkin 5y ago
      I think it's help with their image.
    - nicolashahn 5y ago
      There are a lot of teams within Facebook that use Rust, and a lot of things that could be improved with Rust that would benefit Facebook as well as everyone else. (I work at Facebook on a team that uses Rust)
    - sethhochberg 5y ago
      FB are large enough that they do a ton of their own very low level work - up to and including things like their own bespoke datacenter switches and SDN platform, stuff which is almost wholly distinct from what their core product is. (https://engineering.fb.com/2019/03/14/data-center-engineering/f16-minipack/ https://engineering.fb.com/2019/03/14/data-center-engineerin...) It seems entirely possible that, even putting aside the PR, they're concerned about making sure a robust modern systems language stays around/thvives so that they have a robust modern systems language to use.
      - nanna 5y ago
        Ok, fair enough.
    - 5y ago
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  Facebook has been contributing to the Rust ecosystem for a long time; they've been sponsoring Rust conferences for the past few years, they've had employees helping do work as part of the teams. EDIT: oh, they've also published another post detailing their history with Rust. Lots of very interesting things in here! https://engineering.fb.com/2021/04/29/developer-tools/rust/ https://engineering.fb.com/2021/04/29/developer-tools/rust/
- morrbo 5y ago
  It makes me the opposite. I hate the idea of Facebook and the damage it's fine, and I don't have an account. That being said Facebook has done some absolutely amazing open source projects (rocksdb, open hardware) and papers detailing the exact technology they use (seaweedfs is based on a research paper they published) so I'm sure a lot of cool tech will come from their adoption
- meragrin_ 5y ago
  Why? Facebook is not the sole large corporation in the foundation. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all founding platinum members.
hiq 5y ago
Statement from the Rust Foundation: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-membership-update/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-membership... It seems there are a few new silver members as well.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  The Facebook Member director's letter linked there is also very interesting: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-introducing-joel-marcey/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-introducin...
  - jimarcey 5y ago
    Thank you! And the FDISK story is absolutely true. I can still remember my father's surprise at how reckless I was with his computer.
- prophesi 5y ago
  Awesome. I've been keeping an eye on Zama AI, and in particular their Concrete[0] library. Glad to see they're a member now. [0] https://github.com/zama-ai/concrete/ https://github.com/zama-ai/concrete/
xgulfie 5y ago
Can anyone speak to what power this gives them in the rust foundation, other than just good will and the dependence on funding?
- benatkin 5y ago
  Too much. It goads people in the Rust community to pretend to think Facebook is well-meaning company. I'm going to continue thinking Facebook doesn't care about people, even when they're being killed by the thousands, and I'm more comfortable doing that as someone who uses Vue and Python and not Rust. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45449938 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45449938 Edit: I realized I'm slowly getting into Deno, which is based on Rust, so I should probably just lean into Rust.
  - door101 5y ago
    Facebook is one of the sponsors of the Python Software Foundation too. https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/ https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/
    - benatkin 5y ago
      Somehow they've managed to stay out of the news, while Rust has been endorsing BigCo's regularly for a while now...
      - cortesoft 5y ago
        What does it mean for Rust to be endorsing BigCos?
        dangerbird2 5y ago
        Not much other than reflecting the reality that BigCos are using rust in production, and as a result, have a vested interest in the project's governance. This is true for pretty much every popular language of software with an open governance model.
lacker 5y ago
This is a great step for the Rust Foundation and a sign that Rust is transitioning successfully to a foundation model rather than a Mozilla-centric organization. It looks like some people are worried about Facebook's influence on Rust, but that doesn't seem like a huge concern to me. Facebook isn't going to want to influence Rust in any particularly "Facebooky" way since it's such a deep-in-the-infrastructure component. They will just have the same concerns that many other large tech companies have, like, can you use it successfully in an environment that has a zillion engineers and a zillion other programming languages to interoperate with. It's important for Rust to be nice to use at both big and small companies so that's a good sort of voice to have in the foundation.
- brundolf 5y ago
  It does bring up something we don't always like to think about, which is that by contributing to the progression of very general technologies we often empower people/organizations who are doing things that may be bad for the world. But I'm not sure what there is to be done about that, and it isn't limited to Rust (or Facebook for that matter), and I don't think this event really makes that state of affairs worse in any particular way. It just remains an uncomfortable and (seemingly) unavoidable fact of our industry.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    It is hard to imagine progress in any technology that couldn’t also be used for evil. Better food production could feed bad guys. Curing cancer could extend the life of a mass murderer. I don’t think we will stop evil corporations by preventing them from using memory safe and performant programming languages.
    - chmod600 5y ago
      The other post just raised it as something to think about. It's a good idea to do a sanity check once in a while. More technology has generally been better, but not in all cases and it's not guaranteed to continue that way. Bitcoin is cool, but the consequence is using a lot of energy and facilitating a lot of extortion. Open source seems great, but it also facilitated the rise of AWS which effectively locks people out of software more than closed source software ever did. We already know the rationalizations, we tell themselves to ourselves every day. But remembering the costs is healthy.
3pt14159 5y ago
Does anyone know what the financial requirements are to be a platinum or silver level member of the Rust Foundation? I clicked around on their website but couldn't find the answer.
- hobofan 5y ago
  Rough guess: In the inauguration blog post[0], a yearly budget of $1mil was mentioned, when there were 5 founding members (so $200k/year/company). I am not sure if the distinction they make on the "Members" page between "Founding Platinum" and "Platinum" has any practical implications, but I guess that new members might have to pay a premium. So possibly +$200k/year/company for Platinum level. [0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-world/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-worl...
  - tpatool 5y ago
    So that would be just enough to pay the bureaucracy, like in other foundations. It seems they just want some influence and use it as a hiring bait. After having been hired, you'll be asked to work on a legacy C++ code base.
ksec 5y ago
The most important news to me, Patrick Walton is now working in Facebook? Seems lots of people left Mozilla.
- habitue 5y ago
  Mozilla laid off most of the people working on Rust last year, so there is a bit of a diaspora.
poptartthief 5y ago
Days without a Rust headline on HN : 0. I almost hate Rust just because it seems like it's shoved down my throat.
yannoninator 5y ago
I'm sad to announce that I fucking called it on the day of the Rust foundation's formation [0]. Say what you want, but the problem here is that you don't need to give board seats to those who have tons of cash, rather instead have them sponsor it, like how the R foundation has done. Facebook essentially bought a board seat to drive and prioritise which features they want in the development of Rust. The wolf eats the same grass as the sheep and gets praise for it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26124316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26124316
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  > to drive and prioritise which features they want in the development of Rust. The foundation is not involved in feature development, so this doesn't make a ton of sense.
  - yannoninator 5y ago
    what does a platinum seat get you then? it doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money on a seat and not do anything. I am sure facebook has other motives than paying engineers to work on rust. a regular sponsorship would have a been more enough in this case.
    - steveklabnik 5y ago
      To be clear, I am not a part of the foundation. You can read about it yourself on https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ (with the bylaws being at https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/bylaws/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/bylaws/ ) The foundation's stated mission is to steward the intellectual property of the Rust project, and assist it and its maintainers. That often means things like "paying for legal support" and "paying for CI" and such. The Rust project is the thing that's existed for years, and makes all of the decisions about what happens to Rust technically. The foundation has no position in that hierarchy, and sponsoring the foundation does not get you a seat on the teams that accept RFCs. > a regular sponsorship would have a been more enough in this case. I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing here between "regular" and not. Maybe that they would only want a lower tier sponsorship? I don't know, you'd have to ask them.

180 points by wongmjane 5y ago

nanna 5y ago

Well, that makes me a tad less enthusiastic about Rust.

xiphias2 5y ago
It had to happen, the only way to make a programming language successful is to have it backed by most big tech companies.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  They can contribute without having any special status. Rust already has a robust RFC process and good technical leadership. My worry is that these things weaken and rust very gradually becomes your typical corporate software product where more and more independent features are just bolted on without care to any larger vision. That won’t happen if FB, etc keep contributing as ordinary contributors. But it could happen if they’re elevated to a position of leadership.
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    Note that the Foundation doesn't have any impact on the RFC process or the project's structure or governance, so while that worry may exist, this announcement isn't a path towards doing that.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Python, C, C++, Perl, Bash were pretty successful before the modern FAANG culture. Same for projects other than programming languages, e.g. Linux. I don't feel comfortable with corporate-driven FOSS. I'll stick with community languages.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    As for C, sure, AT&T is so much better than FAANG. C++ was also heavyly corporate. Python won over Ruby because of FAANG support (I personally like Ruby more, but as it's not supported by big companies, it remained behind in deep learning for example). Also NVIDIA has great Python support, which is really important for high performance software development. As for Perl, I just look at it as a stepping stone for more modern scripting languages.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      A lot of companies also contributed to Linux, but that's not the issue. The concern comes from having a *small* number of companies with a notoriously aggressive behavior controlling a project. Google is especially known for using products as weapons against competitors and drop them suddenly after a while.
      - xiphias2 5y ago
        Sure tying Rust development cycle to Azure+VS code, AWS or GCP would be quite bad (run rust-analyzer on Azure for example). At least Facebook doesn't have this kind of infrastructure yet.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  I wouldn’t say so. A language like Haskell is successful, even if their motto is “avoid success at all costs.” Books have been written about the language, and the ecosystem and community are thriving. Even still, few corporate sponsors exist.
brink 5y ago
Starting with the next version; when you compile, you will see a facebook ad.
- benatkin 5y ago
  "rustc" is the facebook ad. They've linked themselves to the name.
ryan93 5y ago
I doubt Zuckerberg will be personally involved. It will be all engineers.
- geodel 5y ago
  Exactly right. After all engineers are just working for salary, eating free meals, cashing their RSUs. They have no clue or hand in how Facebook makes money today. Moreover they promise to learn about FB's business and write a strongly worded letter on "Why I left Facebook" when leaving after vesting most of company stocks
serverholic 5y ago
Why? Facebook engineering is highly regarded.
- adenozine 5y ago
  Perhaps in capability, not so much by reputation or social utility.
  - brian_herman 5y ago
    True but if someone would pay you 200k to develop rust things wouldn’t you say yes?
    - vaylian 5y ago
      I would not say yes. You can't buy ethics.
    - adenozine 5y ago
      Sure! I was just adding context to the other comment with my own. I've no qualms with whomever spending money on whatever language they choose. Unless it's VB. Yuck.
  - door101 5y ago
    If the Rust foundation only took money from morally upright tech companies, it would be bankrupt.
    - adenozine 5y ago
      I agree, I was only meaning to add context to that other comment.
Isn0gud 5y ago
Why? On the tech side, engineers at facebook have contributed some great open source work.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Just like how every environmentalist love the oil and gas companies because they are offsetting their carbon emissions
  - Isn0gud 5y ago
    How does this comparison make any sense? I'd definitely prefer oil and gas companies that offset carbon emissions over oil and gas companies that don't. (Not going into how much pr that is over how much it's actually worth anything)
amelius 5y ago
Rust should include in their license: "The Software/Language shall be used for Good, not Evil" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not_Evil%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not...
- capableweb 5y ago
  Since that line could be interpreted as just "The Software/Language shall be used for Good", any software that is not explicitly "Good" would be forbidden to use Rust, effectively making Rust useless in 90% of companies.
- steveklabnik 5y ago
  Core team member here. There's no desire to change the license. Also, practically, we do not have a CLA, and have had just under six thousand distinct contributors. We cannot unilaterally change the license. This is a feature, not a bug.
- justapassenger 5y ago
  Who decides what’s good and what’s evil? Real life isn’t kindergarten, world isn’t black and white. Even for things that most of people can agree are good, you’ll have negative externalities.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - amelius 5y ago
    It was just a suggestion without the details carved out. You could make it very explicit: X shall not be used for advertising purposes. In legalese, of course, so a judge knows what is meant.
    - justapassenger 5y ago
      Define advertising purpose. Rust affiliated organizations are advertising (for example conferences are being advertised). Is only serving ads or also using ads not allowed? Given that almost every single company in the world is using advertising then it becomes a hobbyist tool. With serving - how about if I have a page/app that includes ads served by third party (like most of the world does). Does it make it also off limits? Statements like that sound pretty cool, but ignore real world complexity.
mbStavola 5y ago
This is what adoption and maturity looks like. As the language starts to see serious use, you see companies start to consider the language's future and direction.
rectang 5y ago
The kinds of things that Facebook most often receives flak for would be difficult to pursue though the layer of indirection that is sponsoring a foundation dedicated to the Rust programming language. Similarly, since Facebook isn't a software vendor, the kinds of things that you might achieve by securing undue influence within the Rust Foundation don't really benefit them.
- brabel 5y ago
  But what's in it for Facebook then? They're spending real money, there's got to be something for them to benefit from?
  - benatkin 5y ago
    I think it's help with their image.
  - nicolashahn 5y ago
    There are a lot of teams within Facebook that use Rust, and a lot of things that could be improved with Rust that would benefit Facebook as well as everyone else. (I work at Facebook on a team that uses Rust)
  - sethhochberg 5y ago
    FB are large enough that they do a ton of their own very low level work - up to and including things like their own bespoke datacenter switches and SDN platform, stuff which is almost wholly distinct from what their core product is. (https://engineering.fb.com/2019/03/14/data-center-engineering/f16-minipack/ https://engineering.fb.com/2019/03/14/data-center-engineerin...) It seems entirely possible that, even putting aside the PR, they're concerned about making sure a robust modern systems language stays around/thvives so that they have a robust modern systems language to use.
    - nanna 5y ago
      Ok, fair enough.
  - 5y ago
steveklabnik 5y ago
Facebook has been contributing to the Rust ecosystem for a long time; they've been sponsoring Rust conferences for the past few years, they've had employees helping do work as part of the teams. EDIT: oh, they've also published another post detailing their history with Rust. Lots of very interesting things in here! https://engineering.fb.com/2021/04/29/developer-tools/rust/ https://engineering.fb.com/2021/04/29/developer-tools/rust/
morrbo 5y ago
It makes me the opposite. I hate the idea of Facebook and the damage it's fine, and I don't have an account. That being said Facebook has done some absolutely amazing open source projects (rocksdb, open hardware) and papers detailing the exact technology they use (seaweedfs is based on a research paper they published) so I'm sure a lot of cool tech will come from their adoption
meragrin_ 5y ago
Why? Facebook is not the sole large corporation in the foundation. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all founding platinum members.

hiq 5y ago

Statement from the Rust Foundation: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-membership-update/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-membership... It seems there are a few new silver members as well.

xiphias2 5y ago
The Facebook Member director's letter linked there is also very interesting: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-introducing-joel-marcey/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-04-29-introducin...
- jimarcey 5y ago
  Thank you! And the FDISK story is absolutely true. I can still remember my father's surprise at how reckless I was with his computer.
prophesi 5y ago
Awesome. I've been keeping an eye on Zama AI, and in particular their Concrete[0] library. Glad to see they're a member now. [0] https://github.com/zama-ai/concrete/ https://github.com/zama-ai/concrete/

xgulfie 5y ago

Can anyone speak to what power this gives them in the rust foundation, other than just good will and the dependence on funding?

benatkin 5y ago
Too much. It goads people in the Rust community to pretend to think Facebook is well-meaning company. I'm going to continue thinking Facebook doesn't care about people, even when they're being killed by the thousands, and I'm more comfortable doing that as someone who uses Vue and Python and not Rust. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45449938 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45449938 Edit: I realized I'm slowly getting into Deno, which is based on Rust, so I should probably just lean into Rust.
- door101 5y ago
  Facebook is one of the sponsors of the Python Software Foundation too. https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/ https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/
  - benatkin 5y ago
    Somehow they've managed to stay out of the news, while Rust has been endorsing BigCo's regularly for a while now...
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      What does it mean for Rust to be endorsing BigCos?
      - dangerbird2 5y ago
        Not much other than reflecting the reality that BigCos are using rust in production, and as a result, have a vested interest in the project's governance. This is true for pretty much every popular language of software with an open governance model.

lacker 5y ago

This is a great step for the Rust Foundation and a sign that Rust is transitioning successfully to a foundation model rather than a Mozilla-centric organization. It looks like some people are worried about Facebook's influence on Rust, but that doesn't seem like a huge concern to me. Facebook isn't going to want to influence Rust in any particularly "Facebooky" way since it's such a deep-in-the-infrastructure component. They will just have the same concerns that many other large tech companies have, like, can you use it successfully in an environment that has a zillion engineers and a zillion other programming languages to interoperate with. It's important for Rust to be nice to use at both big and small companies so that's a good sort of voice to have in the foundation.

brundolf 5y ago
It does bring up something we don't always like to think about, which is that by contributing to the progression of very general technologies we often empower people/organizations who are doing things that may be bad for the world. But I'm not sure what there is to be done about that, and it isn't limited to Rust (or Facebook for that matter), and I don't think this event really makes that state of affairs worse in any particular way. It just remains an uncomfortable and (seemingly) unavoidable fact of our industry.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  It is hard to imagine progress in any technology that couldn’t also be used for evil. Better food production could feed bad guys. Curing cancer could extend the life of a mass murderer. I don’t think we will stop evil corporations by preventing them from using memory safe and performant programming languages.
  - chmod600 5y ago
    The other post just raised it as something to think about. It's a good idea to do a sanity check once in a while. More technology has generally been better, but not in all cases and it's not guaranteed to continue that way. Bitcoin is cool, but the consequence is using a lot of energy and facilitating a lot of extortion. Open source seems great, but it also facilitated the rise of AWS which effectively locks people out of software more than closed source software ever did. We already know the rationalizations, we tell themselves to ourselves every day. But remembering the costs is healthy.

3pt14159 5y ago

Does anyone know what the financial requirements are to be a platinum or silver level member of the Rust Foundation? I clicked around on their website but couldn't find the answer.

hobofan 5y ago
Rough guess: In the inauguration blog post[0], a yearly budget of $1mil was mentioned, when there were 5 founding members (so $200k/year/company). I am not sure if the distinction they make on the "Members" page between "Founding Platinum" and "Platinum" has any practical implications, but I guess that new members might have to pay a premium. So possibly +$200k/year/company for Platinum level. [0] https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-world/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-02-08-hello-worl...
- tpatool 5y ago
  So that would be just enough to pay the bureaucracy, like in other foundations. It seems they just want some influence and use it as a hiring bait. After having been hired, you'll be asked to work on a legacy C++ code base.

ksec 5y ago

The most important news to me, Patrick Walton is now working in Facebook? Seems lots of people left Mozilla.

habitue 5y ago
Mozilla laid off most of the people working on Rust last year, so there is a bit of a diaspora.

poptartthief 5y ago

Days without a Rust headline on HN : 0. I almost hate Rust just because it seems like it's shoved down my throat.

yannoninator 5y ago

I'm sad to announce that I fucking called it on the day of the Rust foundation's formation [0]. Say what you want, but the problem here is that you don't need to give board seats to those who have tons of cash, rather instead have them sponsor it, like how the R foundation has done. Facebook essentially bought a board seat to drive and prioritise which features they want in the development of Rust. The wolf eats the same grass as the sheep and gets praise for it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26124316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26124316

steveklabnik 5y ago
> to drive and prioritise which features they want in the development of Rust. The foundation is not involved in feature development, so this doesn't make a ton of sense.
- yannoninator 5y ago
  what does a platinum seat get you then? it doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money on a seat and not do anything. I am sure facebook has other motives than paying engineers to work on rust. a regular sponsorship would have a been more enough in this case.
  - steveklabnik 5y ago
    To be clear, I am not a part of the foundation. You can read about it yourself on https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ (with the bylaws being at https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/bylaws/ https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/bylaws/ ) The foundation's stated mission is to steward the intellectual property of the Rust project, and assist it and its maintainers. That often means things like "paying for legal support" and "paying for CI" and such. The Rust project is the thing that's existed for years, and makes all of the decisions about what happens to Rust technically. The foundation has no position in that hierarchy, and sponsoring the foundation does not get you a seat on the teams that accept RFCs. > a regular sponsorship would have a been more enough in this case. I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing here between "regular" and not. Maybe that they would only want a lower tier sponsorship? I don't know, you'd have to ask them.