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.
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-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.
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.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but based on the Rust Foundation website, it looks like the point of the organization is mainly to allocate funds to pay people to do work relating to the Rust language and community. So it seems like paying for a board seat means you get to indirectly influence the direction of Rust by deciding which parts people get paid to work on, and which parts are stuck with unpaid volunteers. I don't necessarily see anything wrong with that, it's good to see people get paid and the people paying should have a say in it, but it seems different from people claiming that paying for a board seat doesn't give them any additional influence over Rust.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Lawyer won't be able to make those basic decisions for you. They'll be able to help write it in a way that has chance of being enforceable, but if you don't know where you want to draw the line, they also won't
Why? What effect would this have, in your opinion?
Also, who decides what is "good", and what is "evil"? For proper licensing terms, a judge can decide whether those terms have been violated within a given jurisdiction. Would you have philosophers take their place? What a bunch of nonsense.
> Also, who decides what is "good", and what is "evil"?
Huh, Rust developers have plenty of opinions about "good" and "evil" on everything under sun. They peddle it non-stop on social media. So they seem perfectly capable to decide on that.
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.
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.
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.