| HN Mirror

> but did rub off the rustlang community the wrong way?

I find it interesting that people bring up my time contributing to Rust as a negative thing, largely due to my former business partner misrepresenting it and falsely claiming I was kicked out of the project. To be clear, I don't think you're doing it maliciously, but it's quite weird that contributing so much of my time to an open source project and then having that used against me as if working on a set of open source projects nearly full time for a year as a volunteer was a terrible thing to do. It's a large part of why I now avoid doing work without compensation. If people are going to value my work so little, then I'm at least going to get paid for it.

I left Rust on my own accord because I wasn't enjoying it anymore and I'd determined that it was extremely unlikely that it would turn into a career which is part of why I'd persisted long past the point that I was enjoying it. It became harder and harder to accomplish anything of substantial value as it moved towards stability. I had strong opinions on many of the topics and to get anything done as an outsider I had to make strong arguments and be incredibly persistent, which rubbed some people the wrong way. It was also very rough at that time being an outsider and trying to have a significant influence on it, especially when I disagreed in many areas with the core developers. The way things were done drastically changed later on for the better. I left the project for the same reason a few people didn't like my involvement in it. I was getting burned out dealing with them and they were getting burned out dealing with me. It certainly went both ways and the vast majority of the people involved in the project didn't have issues with me. Out of thousands of people, there were only a couple that I truly didn't get along with and literally only one person where that persists today (and believe me, I'm not the only person who doesn't click with them).

I've certainly evolved how I communicate with people online since then. I still take serious issue with people bending the truth and being dishonest / misleading, which can make arguments very heated if people aren't trying to debate based on the facts. There's a tiny minority of people that I absolutely don't get along with because they'll keep bending the truth and I'll keep pointing out that they're doing it, which they can interpret as an insult. In the context of a debate over the design of a project where the stakes are high, I'll choose not to be very diplomatic when the alternative is letting someone walk all over me with false claims. It's too tiring refuting things over and over and having facts treated as subjective things rather than being able to agree upon a set of facts and argue things based on their merits. I think the world would be a better place if people didn't tolerate this so much. I was no good at playing politics and choosing my battles carefully which played a big part in it too.

The objective truth is that I decided to leave the Rust project and community, and I removed myself as a contributor from the repository. If I recall correctly, I think someone misinterpreted what happened and posted a thread on /r/rust incredibly angry because they thought I was kicked out of the project. The people who saw the thread but weren't aware of the details assumed that it actually happened and then had a massive fight with each other about whether something that didn't happen was justified or not. The reality is that it didn't happen in the first place.

I also seriously doubt that I would be kicked out of any project for occasionally being a bit abrasive in arguments. It would be a bit ridiculous for a project to ban people from contributing for having that kind of personality or not being neurotypical. It's possible that they would have asked me to start being less abrasive in debates, sure, but they hadn't. I definitely don't think I was always fun to work with, particularly once things had soured with Mozilla, but I don't think it's entirely fair to put all the blame on me for that. I was upset about what had happened overall and that definitely influenced how I participated.

My experiences with Rust and other projects are what led to me making sure that I'd own and control the projects that I'd be heavily working on in the future so I wouldn't need to spend so much of my time debating and playing politics. When I co-founded Copperhead, I made sure that it was explicitly agreed that my open source work would remain under my control despite the company sponsoring it. It was explicit that I would own and control the OS development project. It's worth noting that there were 3 co-founders, and 2 of us believed in open source and the company building value around it rather than by selling it. Unfortunately, the 3rd co-founder left early on before shares were even divided up, and I ended up owning the company 50/50 with a narcissistic sociopath who ended up totally screwing me over. Internally, there was conflict and dysfunction long before it became public. I wanted to be free of that company for a long time, but I couldn't leave because I couldn't just abandon the people using the project and it had become too tied to the company. Eventually, my business partner decided to throw away all the agreements and just try to take over the project with threats / ultimatums. I don't think it was at all rational for him to do that. It wasn't at all in his best interest even from an entirely selfish point of view. There's absolutely no way I was going to turn over ownership / control of my project to someone that by then I considered highly untrustworthy and downright dangerous. Unfortunately, they had set up everything to be able to completely screw with over by tricking me at various points and being very strategic about how the domain, infrastructure, etc. was set up. It ended up not mattering at all that I owned 50% of the shares because they just ignored my rights as a shareholder and banked on me not wanting to spend a huge amount of money fighting them in court.

GrapheneOS is the direct continuation of my work on this, which began before Copperhead became involved in it. It had existed before it was CopperheadOS. I've learned a lot of lessons from the experience there. One of the biggest mistakes was being tricked into not being a director early on, but that was also before the stakes had become so high. It also really shouldn't have mattered to the extent that it did if the Copperhead lawyer had been at all competent and truly looked after the interest of the company instead of acting solely on behalf of my business partner. Anyway, I'd rather not be directly involved in businesses at all. I've had almost nothing but bad experiences with governments, businesses, etc. including things far worse than the stuff with Copperhead.