[lacker]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[eslaught]

I think the more appropriate analogy is not bitcoin, but underlying crypto technologies. Should stop researching crypto (or should we repudiate past crypto research) because it might result in new mining technologies? I think the answer to that is clearly no. But that's precisely the issue with these very general technologies: they enable a broad set of use cases that includes things you might not have thought about.

[khuey]

Roads enable bank robbers to get away from the crime scene but nobody thinks that's a reason not to have roads.

[ChrisSD]

I don't think Rust has been a "Mozilla-centric" organization in a long time. Or at least the Foundation has no bearing on it.

Very early on Rust was made independent of Mozilla. And since the layoffs it's hard to argue they had much indirect influence left even before the Foundation was started. Well, no more than other companies using Rust.

[erk__]

I would be a bit more enthusiastic about it if the foundations wasn't the closed black box it seems to be at the moment. Either they are yet to have a board meeting or they have not published the minutes, both possibilities are not great.

[DyslexicAtheist]

Why take money, and allow influence from a company with a history of so many bad actions. It is all rather shameful that this is celebrated and IMO no different than if they would have welcomed Mindgeek, Parler or Gab to the table.

This will get downvoted into oblivion. But complaining (over and over) about how certain companies do "terrible things", or how RMS shouldn't be allowed on the FSF board, or Github/ICE, or Amazon predatory behavior against employees wanting to unionize, but then _not_ call this out and pretend it's fine ... is peak hypocrisy.

[jillesvangurp]

I agree, this is a sign of being highly relevant. The more companies that get involved, the better. The Rust foundation looks like it is set up for success here. Very similar to e.g. the Eclipse, Apache, and Linux foundations have been for ages. Mozilla did this right.

Basically Google, MS, Facebook, and probably loads of others are using Rust in their mutual tech stacks. They have a shared interest. none of them get to dominate. The Rust foundation is the neutral ground where they collaborate. Schoolbook use of open source as a means to collaborate between frenemies.

[meragrin_]

So Microsoft, Amazon, and Google being founding platinum members has little bearing on Rust transitioning to a foundation model which is not a Mozilla-centric organization?

[lacker]

Well those are great too. Every donation helps the Rust Foundation do its work, it's as simple as that.

[whatshisface]

The only thing that has any bearing on why Rust transitioned to a non-Mozilla-centric organization is the fact that Mozilla cut the team to focus on Firefox.

[jhgb]

> to focus on Firefox.

Finally? It took them almost two decades!