[HN Gopher] Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
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Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
Author : max_
Score : 469 points
Date : 2023-05-30 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| [deleted]
| nologic01 wrote:
| Politicking, back-stabing, power games, or even genuine but
| irreconcilably different visions and values are like 90% of
| corporate life.
|
| It is almost deterministic: when collective behavior builds
| something interesting _somebody_ will try to climb on the
| building roof to stick out and be seen and somebody else will try
| to prevent them.
|
| The difference with FOSS is that such individual/community
| dynamics is out in the open, meticulously documented in git
| repos, so even a small bit of that behavior creates fireworks.
|
| This isn't really a weakness of the model and it is futile to
| believe that this type of phenomena could be completely
| eliminated if we could somehow devise the "perfect code of
| conduct" or governance.
|
| Hunker down, build good FOSS stuff. This, too, will pass.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| More of a Rust dabbler/observer at this point, but one thing I've
| never been a fan of is the actual name. It is neither pretentious
| or anti-pretentious.
|
| The forker missed an opportunity to at least improve that,
| instead choosing a name that probably mostly subliminally
| enforces their dissatisfaction with Rust governance itself. Might
| as well have called it SheldonsSpot or OffMyLawn. I would have
| riffed the rust thing: Oxide or something similar.
| golergka wrote:
| Are least is not a very popular videogame.
| ZoF wrote:
| [dead]
| blastro wrote:
| why do so many things evolve into crabs?
| [deleted]
| azraeldv wrote:
| top language : "rust", shell
| planede wrote:
| I don't see this as a real fork, the same way CentOS isn't (or
| wasn't) a real fork for RedHat, or Iceweasel wasn't a real fork
| of Firefox. This seems only meant to be work around the
| trademark. If all this does is to establish an other, non-
| trademark encumbered name you can use to refer to the language
| and the compiler than that could be good.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| If that's what happens, it's not a great outcome. Foundation
| changes policy, restricting the use of a mark, to enormous
| opposition. After much dissent, the community responds by...
| ceasing to use the mark. That's what they were asking for! The
| policy was bad. So is disinviting someone from a keynote
| address. The question is, do you want those things to be
| changed? Acceding to the demands and quietly backing away, no
| matter how much fun it is to add a crab emoji file extension,
| will not achieve that on its own.
|
| If a whole slew of things were only available in Crab, the Rust
| trade mark would be devalued. That would be the one coherent
| theory of why you would launch such a project and try to get
| others on board. And it is why Ashley G Williams was commenting
| in that Register piece on the lack of technical talent
| ("language designers") that had jumped ship. Commitment of
| talent and effort and resources is by and large what makes the
| trade mark valuable. People who are important to the project
| _leaving_ is the only useful measure of an effective protest.
|
| Since the Crab project fails to mention any specific people who
| have signed on, or even who decided to create it, I don't see
| it having any impact whatsoever. The Rust Foundation will not
| feel threatened by this. I suspect the maximum it can be is
| just another IceWeasel. That is certainly the vision laid out
| by this person on one of the issues, who despite posting as if
| they created it, is careful to disclaim any responsibility for
| the project or to call any of the decisions their own. (Come
| on!)
| https://github.com/crablang/crab/issues/14#issuecomment-1508...
|
| It's also the vision laid out on the website: " _promoting the
| language without worrying about the litigation associated with
| trademark infringement._ " Basically the project has outlined
| the least ambitious possible goals and apparently nobody is
| willing to sign their name on it. My advice is to write an open
| letter and open it for signatures instead.
| Xylakant wrote:
| As an end-run around the trademark policy in the iceweasel
| style, crablang is useless. You can already use rust without
| being in violation of the trademark policy - you just can't
| name your project rust-foo or call your compiler rusty unless
| it's actually rustc. Crablang doesn't change anything about
| that.
|
| The iceweasel situation is different AFAIR - Mozilla (IMHO
| reasonably) wants binaries that are called Firefox to be
| unmodified Firefox to avoid confusion, bug reports etc.
| Debian didn't want to respect that policy and this decided to
| fork and patch, renaming the project to comply with the
| policy. You can do the same for rust, but that's not what
| crablang does, at least now.
| electroly wrote:
| > you just can't name your project rust-foo or call your
| compiler rusty unless it's actually rustc. Crablang doesn't
| change anything about that.
|
| My understanding is the intention is that you can call your
| project _crab-foo_ or your compiler _crabby_ and be sure
| that nobody from Crab is going to get upset at you. You had
| that choice before, too, but now they 've come up with a
| common name for everyone to share.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Also see ECMAScript vs JavaScript.
| preommr wrote:
| Branching projects and diversity is always good.
|
| But the reasons for this one are laughable. Formalising a
| trademark policy and a guy getting demoted to regular speaker
| insetad of keynote speaker? Seriously? People are screaming
| fascism over this?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > a guy getting demoted to regular speaker insetad of keynote
| speaker?
|
| I don't think the issue was who the keynote speaker should be;
| as far as I can tell, it's the (lack of) process over that
| decision.
|
| /me has no skin in this game.
| junon wrote:
| Nice. I like this. The Rust core team/foundation/project/whatever
| nonsense needs to get its shit together. Their actions are
| starting to kill the project.
| thdxr wrote:
| people love blaming feedback to the system instead of the system
|
| no one wants two versions of rust including the creator of
| crablang
|
| but this is how you provide signals to those in charge that
| they've gone over the line
| macinjosh wrote:
| I use a language because it works for what I am doing, not
| because I know everyone who wrote the code is perfectly nice and
| well behaved.
|
| If we are going to be easily offended wtf is up with the crab
| wielding a knife? So violent.
| usgroup wrote:
| I've invested in a fair bit of time in learning Rust fairly
| recently -- asking naively, but is this sort of thing something
| which could realistically compromise the future of the language?
| WuxiFingerHold wrote:
| This fork is just a symbolic act. However, the ongoing drama
| around Rust creates real damage.
|
| Why should someone invest in a language where there're
| constantly drama about social or political issues? The focus
| should be on improving the language?
| cookieperson wrote:
| No. It's just people doing what they want with OSS. The
| majority of the mindshare is still in one place. It looks more
| like a protest and or a hobby project then anything else.
| akkad33 wrote:
| Wasn't Rust also started as a hobby project?
| cookieperson wrote:
| Yep! And that's why I say go for it. Worst comes to worst
| some smart kids get great experience writing cool software.
| [deleted]
| gloosx wrote:
| There are five posts in the past 47 days that desperately try to
| draw attention to the fact that Rust has a community fork now
| called Crab. The last four accumulated almost no activity, but
| this one suddenly made it.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| [flagged]
| unixhero wrote:
| It seems that the Rust project is going sideways
| znpy wrote:
| I was expecting this to happen, sooner or later, given all the
| drama around rust, it was just a matter of time.
|
| I really hope this project doesn't take a bad turn, and succeeds.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Finally, is this Rust but good?
|
| All the best for Crab Lang, they have my contact info if they
| ever need a PLT legend.
| aa_is_op wrote:
| "All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less
| bureaucracy! "
|
| Did I miss some drama?
| randomsofr wrote:
| you did
|
| https://www.jntrnr.com/why-i-left-rust/
| [deleted]
| bhouston wrote:
| Is this comparable to the Nodejs ioJs split early in the history
| of node?
| AbuAssar wrote:
| this is an immature move
|
| related:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/12kze9m/how_does_rli...
| Klonoar wrote:
| This is not new.
| sgt wrote:
| 3 years later; Crab has been forked to the Shrimp language /s
| tirpen wrote:
| Well, people fork languages and libraries all the time.
|
| Does this fork have a significant amount of support? By whom? Or
| why is this news worthy?
| grt_thr wrote:
| Rust has been rather monolithic. There is no such thing as a
| rust spec, just whatever the rust compiler does. This is a good
| first step to making it into a language people work in rather
| than just blog about.
| [deleted]
| hmry wrote:
| A code-identical fork with a different name for trademark
| reasons is not going to make the Rust team write a spec. Look
| to the GCC Rust implementation for that.
|
| Also, people already do work in Rust. It's in the Linux
| kernel _right now_.
| Brometheus wrote:
| And windows, just behind a flag for the moment.
| tormeh wrote:
| Compiler behavior is the only thing that matters in any
| language, as per Hyrum's law. A spec is a useful tool for
| discussing and building a language, but don't confuse the map
| for the territory.
| eatYourFood wrote:
| [dead]
| insanitybit wrote:
| I've done professional rust development and know many others
| who do. A spec hasn't been an issue for us.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _CrabLang_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592005 -
| April 2023 (77 comments)
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Necessary context: this happened a while back due to the
| trademark policy proposal.
| tpoacher wrote:
| One thing I always find interesting / amusing is how the _timing_
| of certain types of post here on HN is in a sense far more
| informative (e.g. by implication as to "what is the current
| zeitgeist that has suddenly made this "news" or relevant again?),
| than the linked articles themselves.
|
| E.g. crablang wasn't exactly announced yesterday for this to be
| newsworthy in itself; but an HN top post on crablang almost
| serves as a reliable signal for yet another rust gossipworthy
| event being in the news.
|
| Same with Signal/Telegram as a signal for WhatsApp; Telegram as a
| signal for E2EE, etc
| tester756 wrote:
| Indeed, I was like - wut? again?
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| This is the power of the media and why people fight over it so
| much. Whenever you see content you should not only question the
| content itself but also ask "why am I seeing this now"?
| newobj wrote:
| Why am I seeing this now?
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| I think one of the most influential factors of a topic making a
| top post is simply the timing of the post. The most interesting
| topic won't make it if it is posted at an inconvenient time for
| the largest audiences.
| pxc wrote:
| It was posted in the comments to the 'Why I'm leaving Rust'1
| post that made it to the front page two days ago. At that point
| it was predictable that Crab would make it to the front page in
| a day or two.
|
| Comments with links on front page items tend to turn into
| successful submissions within a day or two like that. Or
| rather, a fair number of front page items at any time turn out
| to have been preceded that way.
|
| --
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36101501
| tpoacher wrote:
| Agreed that this is one of the major mechanisms. But that's
| not the point I'm making here. It's a more general point
| regarding how the implicit "Why now?" question is often more
| newsworthy than the explicit "What?" being reported.
|
| And also the fact that, unless the reader is willing to make
| a conscious connection to that fact, the lack of nuance often
| serves to swing a discussion in the opposite direction to
| what conscious examination of the timing would suggest (e.g.
| via the framing effect).
| KevinMS wrote:
| It doesn't matter if this will eventually be a "real" fork or
| not, I don't see that as a meaningful criticism. However, a fork
| + thousands of stars is one of the more unique ways of a grass
| roots protest.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Please, no. This really is a desperado move, I want to hope the
| situation is not so dire.
| insanitybit wrote:
| This fork isn't even new, nor is it interesting. It's a meme at
| this point.
| y7 wrote:
| The main website has an explanation for the reasons behind this:
| https://crablang.org/
|
| More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583089
| lordswork wrote:
| Even more context: https://github.com/crablang/crab/issues/14
| noobdev9000 wrote:
| Rust was always a corporation/FAANG language when you looked at
| contributors and sponsors, so it's probably not real reason, I
| mean it is clear async was rushed out for AWS/Amazon and
| everyone celebrated it nonetheless.
|
| People like to hide motives
| pests wrote:
| I'm curious to the story behind async being rushed out for
| Amazon
| orra wrote:
| The Amazon bit is new, but it's a pervasive myth that
| Rust's async was rushed. Also, that Pin<T> was a design
| mistake.
|
| However, this is very strongly refuted. See [edit: warning:
| abrasively worded post by withoutboats]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26410487
| [deleted]
| Dalewyn wrote:
| [flagged]
| tutuca wrote:
| That's a pretty political statement Dale.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Right now it's being armed, eventually it will be thinking
| and stating wrongspeak.
|
| Seen this song and dance play out so many times my notebook
| is rusty from age.
| octernion wrote:
| why do you people always talk like cartoon villains
| taacc3 wrote:
| [dead]
| yawpitch wrote:
| Sounds like your notebook is also really, really crabby.
| [deleted]
| smt88 wrote:
| Human rights are not political unless you're trying to reduce
| them. Mozilla justifiably did not want to work with someone
| who opposes certain human rights (including those of other
| employees), and that shouldn't be controversial or political.
| Levitz wrote:
| What do human rights have to do with any of this? Isn't
| this about trademarks?
| bloopernova wrote:
| Are there humans involved? Then human rights are also
| involved.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I think they're dredging up Brendan Eich's opposition to
| gay marriage. But no, the latest kerfuffle isn't
| trademarks, either. If you're interested, it's all over
| r/rust.
| smt88 wrote:
| I wasn't dredging it up. I was replying to someone who
| dredged it up first.
| Twirrim wrote:
| If it involves people, it will be political. There's
| absolutely zero way to avoid it short of it being a single-
| person project (and arguably even _that_ will be Political at
| the very least).
| dijit wrote:
| Ah yes "there is always x, so why shy from this x?", I
| wonder if there's a named logical fallacy for this, I think
| the closest might be "Moral Equivalence"
|
| There will always be drama, there will always be politics,
| but I wonder how entities manage to graze by with broad
| support in those situations, possibly by being equitable,
| consistent and transparent? Just guessing.
|
| Python doesn't have so much regarding internal struggles of
| power, same for Linux (BFDL might have his controversies
| but nobody is seriously considering forking the Kernel)-
| and that's one of the largest FOSS projects on the planet.
| Even when things get super sticky (like nvidia) people
| still broadly support Linux and the direction?
|
| Why is that? There's politics, but we're not really
| complaining that there are politics, we're complaining that
| there's a essence of abuse here. We're complaining that
| there is a distinct lack of transparency, consistency, and
| a broad lack of what many would consider to be morally OK.
|
| That's not really politics, but you could just roll it into
| the same word if you're dismissing a project for troubling
| elements that are non-technical. Politics being people and
| all.
| Twirrim wrote:
| > Ah yes "there is always x, so why shy from this x?", I
| wonder if there's a named logical fallacy for this, I
| think the closest might be "Moral Equivalence"
|
| I absolutely did not say that, and would not say that.
| The person I was responding to was making a comment
| saying that a language shouldn't be political.
|
| My point was that it's impossible to have a language that
| isn't political, simply by nature of it involving humans.
| They will disagree. They will need to make decisions.
| They will change their behaviour to get what they want,
| either consciously or subconsciously.
|
| > Python doesn't have so much regarding internal
| struggles of power
|
| What....? Python has all sorts of political crap going
| on. Take a look through the dev forums and mailing lists.
| Look at the various groups and subgroups of developers,
| the way they interact and organise around different
| perspectives etc.
|
| There was a whole bunch of that leading up to Guido's
| eventual stepping down as BDFL, after the long fight to
| get PEP 572 out (walrus operator). He even called it out
| in his stepping down email.
| kuu wrote:
| More context (by dang):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583742
| [deleted]
| esjeon wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is a joke or serious.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I propose that Crab differentiates itself by keeping `yeet` as
| the keyword instead of changing it later
| commitpizza wrote:
| Here is a good walk-through of the changes:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gutR_LNoZw0
|
| I don't particularly care about Rust but one of the reasons I've
| hesitated to learn / use it was because the project seemed like
| it was led by woke people that pushed politics into the
| programming space which imo is completely unnecessary.
|
| One thing I've learned by experience is that people who push
| their political agenda into everything is inherently toxic and
| will destroy everything they come in contact with.
|
| There is no need for a Code of Conduct like so many programming
| projects have today, there is no need to have a "Black lives
| matter" banner on the framework website nor is there any need of
| supporting any other political cause unless it directly affects
| the project or the maintainers. If you start advocating for cause
| x there will always be people who rightfully will argue for cause
| y.
|
| I'm sick and tired of general politics getting pushed into
| everything.
| interlinked wrote:
| > All rust conference must prohibit firearms
|
| Even if the safety is on?
| alkonaut wrote:
| Politics is everywhere and everything. There is no chance of
| "keeping politics out of" anything. Making such a decision or
| rule is highly political too. This goes for sports,
| entertainment, culture, tech, open source.. The fact that there
| are "counterexamples" of successful projects that "thrive
| without involving politics and never had a CoC" isn't an
| argument to the contrary.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Politics is everywhere and everything.
|
| Sure, but just because the $FOO software project is happy to
| incorporate political views on User Freedoms vs Developer
| Freedoms, it doesn't mean that proselytsing some particular
| political candidate is welcome.
|
| IOW, when people reject a particular political topic, you
| can't very well turn around and say "How dare you; you talk
| about free software, and _that 's_ political too!"
|
| A community willing to engage in _one_ political activity
| doesn 't automagically open the door for every vocal minotiry
| to spam them until they cave.
| Veen wrote:
| That's an interesting way of framing a position: "I think X
| and all the obvious counter-examples that might prove me
| wrong are irrelevant.", "Why are they irrelevant?", "Because
| I just said they are!".
|
| Anyway, you're equivocating around the meaning of "politics".
| Yes, everything involving people is political in some sense.
| But that isn't the sense people here are talking about.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I just preempted the usual answer "look at X, they don't
| have a lot of politics and they seem to be doing OK"
| because it's such an obvious non-argument that it shouldn't
| even need explaining.
| commitpizza wrote:
| I get that there will be politics enough to go around and
| honestly I only think it strenghten my point. There is no
| need to bring in external politics since there is enough in
| the technical space alone.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I mean external politics, not "office politics". There is
| no meaningful way of separating any group of people working
| together (a company, an OSS project, whatever) and
| politics.
| commitpizza wrote:
| I understood that, I just think your arguments are bad.
|
| > There is no chance of "keeping politics out of"
| anything. Making such a decision or rule is highly
| political too.
|
| Of course there is and such a decision is not about
| general politics or highly political. It's a bit like
| saying forbidding smoking on school grounds will never
| make it go away so we should just let the kids smoke. In
| fact, I would argue that Rust already has a lot of
| political rules in the code of conduct.
|
| Even if people will break the rules there is still value
| in creating such rules but that will obviously only work
| as long as the people making the rules also abide by them
| which is not the case in the Rust community (among many
| others). It's obvious that certain political views are
| prohibited while others are welcome.
|
| I guess what I am disappointed in is the constant double
| standards. They can have "black lives matters" on their
| webpage but if I were to link to a anti-trans movement
| (just making an example) on their discord it wouldn't
| take long until I'm banned. Anti trans movements and
| black lives matter has nothing to do with most
| development projects, thus none should be pushed on their
| websites.
| loopdoend wrote:
| I wonder why we don't see the same thing on academic papers.
| Surely the people writing those papers are also affected by
| politics.
|
| But somehow it is acceptable for programming languages.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Academic papers are usually written by a small group. But I
| imagine for large collaborations like papers from LHC and
| similar you'd have to deal with some of the same issues any
| major org. It comes at you very quickly. Can you hold an
| important meeting on the day 2 people of 100 are away
| because it's a religious holiday? What do you do about the
| fact that the Ukrainian guy refuses to work until the
| Russian guy is kicked out of the team? And the research
| itself is of course interfacing with politics all the time
| whether they like it or not. Of course more in climate
| research or economics than in theoretical physics but it's
| still there.
| sharikous wrote:
| Honestly how much does their political stance affect your work?
|
| Using a programming language is 99.9% technical work. As long
| as they don't go out of their way e.g. to make rustc compile
| your project wrong if you have files with political content
| with opposing orientation on your computer, how does any of
| that matter?
| commitpizza wrote:
| > Honestly how much does their political stance affect your
| work?
|
| Since I do not use Rust, not at all. But if I were this
| policy would affect me. For example, I had a domain with
| "rust" in it. I let it expire, since I decided not to use
| Rust which now seems like a great choice. I am also soon
| going to be a gun owner. Also, if I were to use Rust I would
| probably join a user group now required to adopt their CoC
| and a bunch of other things.
|
| The main issue with people pusing politics in programming is
| a sign of a possibly unstable project since in my experience
| and by looking at the trademark policy it appears it was
| completely right. Restricting speech and adding a gun policy
| is just wtf. It is a clear indication that the project is run
| by people that have very specific political agendas that
| they're trying to push onto a programming project that has
| nothing to do with them.
| oefrha wrote:
| It shouldn't be a problem if you just use the language. It
| does become something you should be mindful of if you want to
| get more involved, e.g. contribute to core, maintain high
| profile libraries, give talks at conferences, etc.
|
| As a team member of another high profile project, I have had
| the pleasure of being accused (thankfully privately) of being
| intolerant towards trans people because I was very vocal
| about a change breaking backwards compatibility. Apparently
| the person behind the change is trans; I only learned about
| that when I was accused. A decade into woke politics I still
| have no idea why I should give a single shit about which
| bathroom they go in or who they choose to sleep with or
| whatever. But some people won't hesitate to weaponize this
| crap when given the chance, and disappointingly, they can
| often amass a big cheering crowd, or should I say lynching
| mob.
| Nanana909 wrote:
| > the project seemed like it was led by woke people that pushed
| politics into the programming space which imo is completely
| unnecessary
|
| You're not wrong, to a degree, but avoiding the language
| because of this is exactly the wrong take. Instead, if more
| people use it these sentiments are diluted and approach the
| median. IMO by even caring about this at all in your language
| decisions, you're engaging in the exact same kind of game as
| those people are.
| commitpizza wrote:
| > IMO by even caring about this at all in your language
| decisions, you're engaging in the exact same kind of game as
| those people are
|
| Well, that is becaused I feel forced into it. I wouldn't care
| about the maintainers political views unless they pushed it
| down my throat at every opportunity they get.
|
| I feel it is a sound economical choice not to support orgs
| and people who are toxic or actively work against you and
| your interests. I vote with my wallet when it comes to
| products and services but when it comes to languages I vote
| with my time and knowledge. I choose another programming
| language instead, it's not like there isn't any options out
| there.
|
| What if I would have picked Rust? Then I would have to get a
| new domain for my website, I would feel unwelcome in the
| community because I don't share their political opinions and
| likely other things that is yet to come. Nah, I'd rather go
| with people and projects that don't do this kind of crap
| which I don't have time for honestly.
| yla92 wrote:
| All this reminds me of node.js vs io.js
| azangru wrote:
| OpenOffice vs LibreOffice?
|
| MySQL vs MariaDB?
|
| Glimpse vs GIMP (that one didn't go so well)
| no_time wrote:
| radare2 vs Rizin
|
| Debian vs Devuan
|
| FFmpeg vs libav
|
| Audacity vs whatever its called
| keyle wrote:
| I'm just getting into Rust and loving it. This is a big yikes.
|
| This is forking for all the wrong reasons. I mean, as a Rust
| user, why should I use your compiler fork?
|
| I am hopeful the same thing will happen than with node.js/io.js,
| and it will iron itself out.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| At least they didn't name it Crust.
| vekidev wrote:
| [flagged]
| drtgh wrote:
| Always names with generic words which complicates the search.
| Rust metal, Rust the game, Rust what. And now Crab cooking,
| Crab fauna
|
| I'm absolutely convinced that software names are a conspiracy
| for to bring users to the threshold that will make them weep.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Many of the non-generic ones are even worse. C? C#? C++? D?
| Unable to look up "C++ language". The following search tokens
| are too short: C
| reaperman wrote:
| I completely agree, but C/C++ are excusable for being named
| before any internet search engines existed at all.
|
| The other two...well, either viewpoint would have excellent
| arguments pro/con.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| At least with Go you can use "Golang" in search and get
| reasonable results. With Rust, I often have to write
| "rust programming language + [what im searching for]"
| which is really annoying. Not sure if anyone ever dubs
| Rust to "Rustlang".
| jen20 wrote:
| The website is literally rust-lang.org.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| fair point
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Doing far more harm than good.
| noobdev9000 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dmeijboom wrote:
| This happened a while ago and was related to the
| trademark/copyright issue. It's an immature move and I can't take
| this seriously. All this does is creating unnecessary drama
| surrounding the Rust foundation.
| WuxiFingerHold wrote:
| The ongoing drama emerging from the leadership / foundation
| causes real damage to the language. I'm not sure if I like this
| move of forking Rust, but something has to change. And the
| change must be as visible as the drama to help Rust regain the
| lost reputation.
| jntvjnvutnuvt wrote:
| The Rust Foundation thinks it's okay to sue you for altering
| its logo. That is nuts.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I don't see how one could describe this as immature. Immature
| would seem to be just complaining endlessly, memeing, or
| otherwise being immature. Instead, they're unhappy with the
| direction of Mozilla/Rust, and found a perfectly good solution
| to the problem. That's awesome. This seems like one of the many
| benefits of truly open source software. You can fork not only
| to change code, but also culture.
| silisili wrote:
| > All this does is creating unnecessary drama surrounding the
| Rust foundation.
|
| They are doing a fantastic job of creating drama all by
| themselves.
|
| I don't use Rust, but the constant childish bickering has
| turned me away from even caring to.
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| Bingo. All the drama has succeeded in doing is removing Rust
| as a possible language for my next project.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| You can find no trace of childish bickering in the language,
| tools, libraries, or documentation. I'm not sure why people
| doing silly things off in the distance would bias you against
| using Rust, the use of which would not involve those people
| ever.
| silisili wrote:
| While I think your statement is true, a few reasons:
|
| 1 - I will inevitably end up on some mailing list or forums
| when researching libraries, correct way to do things, etc,
| where such people interact.
|
| 2 - As 'governors' of the language, how can I trust them to
| make sound investments in the future? I don't want to just
| learn a language and tooling as a one off.
|
| 3 - I don't want to support organizations that act this
| way, even if the language were perfect.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| 1) This is an accurate complaint. By my estimation (on
| the official discord) they interact in such a way for an
| amortized three of the 1440 minutes in the day.
|
| 2) The language is pretty great. Further serious
| investment is going to be primarily in the third-party
| libraries department.
|
| 3) You need make no contributions, financial or
| otherwise. I am probably a net drain on the foundation's
| resources.
| porcoda wrote:
| > I don't use Rust, but the constant childish bickering has
| turned me away from even caring to.
|
| Same. I want to use it because technically it's the right
| choice for a few projects, but when I talk to people in my
| organization I still label it as "too immature and volatile
| to adopt today, but worth watching". I was hoping the
| adoption by Linux and Microsoft would be the forcing factor
| to stabilize it, but the governance aspect still seems
| chaotic. I'll keep watching and hopefully it calms down such
| that adopting it won't be a risk. Or maybe the good parts
| will just get adopted by a more stable (w.r.t. governance and
| standardization) language.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Rust is pretty stable and clearly past the point of being
| immature and volatile. A few issues that the internet has
| blown up lately doesn't change that.
| jen20 wrote:
| Indeed, by criteria of community drama, .NET is also too
| immature for use. See [1], as the conclusion of that.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/dotnet-
| foundation/Home/discussions/40
| qersist3nce wrote:
| Many years ago, I read a comment on Slashdot saying "the fact
| of a programming language having a "code of conduct" makes it
| ripe for everlasting drama and politics."
|
| It made sense then and it makes sense now.
| DanHulton wrote:
| Every community has a code of conduct, it's just that some
| of them are explicit about it.
| qersist3nce wrote:
| Would the Rust foundation be ok with SQLite CoC? or a
| software project with a CoC in compliance with Uganda
| laws?
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| The fascist part of it is forcing people to use them and
| threatening them when they don't understand the need to
| address a non-problem with terminology, duties, and
| responsibilities they don't agree with.
| alkonaut wrote:
| The reason slashdot is no longer relevant as the go-to tech
| discussion site is just because everyone who loves hating
| on "modern" things like CoC stayed, and everyone else left.
| These days it would be more strange to see a major project
| NOT have a CoC than seeing one. There is drama and politics
| in any large org whether or not there is a CoC or not.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > The reason slashdot is no longer relevant as the go-to
| tech discussion site is just because everyone who loves
| hating on "modern" things like CoC stayed, and everyone
| else left.
|
| That was certainly not my experience; I left because all
| discussions were monopolised by a few seemingly
| unemployed accounts to shame any and everyone into
| agreeing with whatever the vocal minority at the time was
| pushing.
|
| When I stopped reading it, the only people left were
| those who were constantly using shaming language on
| anyone who didn't agree about things like a code of
| conduct, or words are violence too, etc.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Obviously these lists are incomplete. It was a lot harder
| finding major programming languages lacking a CoC than
| finding projects with one.
|
| Language projects with a community Code of Conduct:
|
| Python, Rust, Golang, Ruby, Perl5, Erlang, Elixir, Zig,
| ISO C++ (WG21 https://isocpp.org/std/standing-
| documents/sd-4-wg21-practice...), ISO C (WG14)
| https://lists.isocpp.org/liaison/2021/04/0444.php),
| ECMA/JavaScript (https://tc39.es/code-of-conduct/)
|
| Language projects without:
|
| Java (Oracle's, anyway), Nim
| qersist3nce wrote:
| Slashdot was sold to another media company which had
| other priorities. Are you aware of its "redesign" drama
| strictly followed by that same new leadership? Many users
| left then and there.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I left a long time ago. I think around the same time as
| CmdrTaco. But the place was basically just tech Luddites
| and Microsoft bashing so it became a bit repetitive.
| Also: HN.
| jq-r wrote:
| Slashdot is a good example how a vastly unpopular
| redesign to make the site more "modern" can bring the
| whole business down. It's not even the bad redesign per
| se; it's sticking to it, and not reversing on it. A real
| shame in my opinion as I think that auto-moderation
| system is the best I've seen.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It was ridiculously easy to game the Slashdot moderation
| system. You knew what topics would get upvoted --
| positive about Linux, negative about something like SCO
| during the lawsuit period. It was not difficult to
| accumulate karma.
| detourdog wrote:
| When I read about codes of conduct like this I worry
| about humnan relations. Does remote work cause the need
| for CoC? The over prescription of interactions seem like
| sci-fi to me. I haven't worked in an office since the
| last millennium.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Does remote work cause the need for CoC?
|
| No, CoCs became a trend way before covid made remote work
| possible for the masses. They initially were demanded by
| project members after high-profile scandals of some kind,
| usually racist or otherwise discriminatory bullshit,
| sexual assault on conferences or bullying (Linus Torvalds
| for example used to be infamous for his language), and
| then other projects (or their members) wanted ones as
| well as a preventive measure for the future.
|
| For what it's worth, I dislike CoCs because many of them
| are written with the assumption that people will behave
| like utter trash without being explicitly told not to and
| I grew up with the old "Don't be an asshole" rule [1]...
| but given what happened in the past where people were
| _clearly_ incapable of not being assholes and communities
| having splintered over it, they seem to be inevitable.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_No_Asshol
| e_Rule
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The problem is most people will in fact not be assholes,
| but the ones who have a disproportionate effect, because
| there's no direct penalty. Someone can't stand in your
| yard and loudly shout personal abuse for very long
| without getting hauled away by the police*, but there's
| no such enforcement mechanism online.
|
| [*] yes, it can be more complicated than this. you get my
| meaning.
| MaKey wrote:
| I dislike CoCs because they aren't what they claim to be:
| Instruments to protect people. They are tools of power,
| ready to be used when needed to bully or oust someone. I
| therefore really don't understand the broad acceptance or
| even call for Code of Conducts.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Instruments to protect people. They are tools of
| power, ready to be used when needed to bully or oust
| someone._
|
| They are both.
|
| A CoC, like other weapons, is more or less value-free.
| The CoC itself doesn't care what you point it at. It's a
| question of who is wielding it, and who they're wielding
| it against.
| atq2119 wrote:
| I think this is a reasonable concern. The most recent
| episode of drama out of Rust is a pretty clear example of
| problematic behavior by some leadership person, and so
| it'll be interesting to see whether equally clear
| consequences will result. In other words, it'll be
| interesting to see whether their code of conduct is worth
| the bytes it is stored in.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Except that most languages have significant amounts of
| drama. Rust drama is just more interesting to people
| because it's newer.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Forking is an essential feature in OSS, its what OSS is all
| about.
| agilob wrote:
| Yes, because it worked out well for Java.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| When did Java get forked? The closest case I can think of
| is the Oracle/Google lawsuit, which 1. Oracle lost, and 2.
| wouldn't have even been a thing if Google had _forked_
| rather than reimplementing.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Seems to have worked well enough for OpenBSD, OpenOffice
| (and then LibreOffice from that), Jenkins, OpenSSH, Apache
| Server, WordPress, Inkscape, Webkit and Xorg.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum, I don't get what you are saying.
|
| You mean it didn't work well for Oracle when everybody
| moved to a fork?
| Eldt wrote:
| Do you mean in spite of?
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _All this does is creating unnecessary drama surrounding the
| Rust foundation._
|
| This doesn't create drama surrounding the Rust Foundation, this
| is drama directly caused by the Rust Foundation.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| Its actually not. The most recent drama was caused by the
| Rust Project, not the Rust Foundation, which are two
| completely separate entities. This seems to be a common
| misunderstanding which is being spread around here, including
| the top comment to this post.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It is. This is not caused by the most recent drama but by
| the Rust trademark shitshow, which was definitely by the
| Rust Foundation.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| You're right. I mistakenly thought this was a response to
| the latest drama show.
| datadeft wrote:
| Forking a project is creating a drama now?
|
| Was it the case when nodejs was forked?
|
| https://www.infoworld.com/article/2854642/nodejs-gains-a-new...
| arp242 wrote:
| This, I think, captures the problem quite well; "please don't
| do this, all it does is create drama!"
|
| Maybe so, but the best way to end up with well-intentioned
| people absolutely hating each other is to never allow the
| airing of grievances.
|
| I'm hugely in favour of kind, empathic, and thoughtful
| communication, and I don't like the "people yelling at each
| other"-type of projects to the point I simply don't
| participate. But part of that is also accepting that sometimes
| people express themselves in less-than-ideal ways, and allowing
| for the fact that sometimes conflicts happen, and that _some_
| amount of yelling and drama is necessarily for a healthy
| community (or indeed, most relationships between people)
| because we 're all flawed and emotional beings. Rust took a
| good idea and pushed it to the extreme, which rarely works out
| well.
| allisdust wrote:
| One good thing about these pointless forks is, they help reduce
| the number of people who are in it for the drama and get
| emotionally turbulent for every disagreement. Eventually people
| who actually care for the language and invested in its long term
| success remain. I wish the crab people well and hope they never
| decide to come back to Rust.
|
| PS: Can't help but chuckle reading people's comments on wanting
| to either abandon Rust or not try it. Used to be that languages
| were picked based on use case/fit. Then it turned to hype cycle.
| And now it's going to be based on people drama ?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus. All
| of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less
| bureaucracy!
|
| In a language like Rust isn't bureaucracy a good thing? I'm out
| of the loop on Rust drama FYI
| quangv wrote:
| Related:
| https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/rust_foundation_apolo...
| [deleted]
| vekidev wrote:
| I don't understand the meaning behind having to fork the already
| good language.
| logicchains wrote:
| It's so that people can "use it while retaining the ability to
| create content and promote its name, logo, and other assets
| however we please, without the limitations imposed by a
| trademark policy".
| dijit wrote:
| Concerns with leadership, trademark and governance.
|
| The language is good, the foundation outwardly appears to have
| some problems with how much power they seem to believe they are
| entitled to have.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Forks of a large project seldom survive, they almost always die
| with no active development.
|
| This is a futile move.
| dijit wrote:
| There's plenty of precedent that states forks die, however to
| describe it as entirely futile is:
|
| A) Not exactly constructive.
|
| B) Possibly untrue.
|
| The move might indeed die, if the rust foundations leadership
| gets it's act together. Which is a strong push for them to sort
| things out rather than assuming everything will be fine with
| their current heavy handed and opaque approach.
|
| Failing this, we could be in a situation with another Rocky
| linux, FlatCar linux or LibreOffice ;)
|
| (examples of successful forks)
| oefrha wrote:
| In the examples you gave, either the original project shifted
| course significantly, or there are major technical
| disagreements. Here, pointless trademark drama is all there
| is, and the fork AFAICT replaced some strings and nothing
| else.
| dijit wrote:
| libera.chat
| oefrha wrote:
| Not sure what you are trying to convey. There are a ton
| of IRC hosts out there and they are all interchangeable.
|
| A real language fork is not interchangeable, even a
| different implementation of the same language is going to
| have its subtle compatibility problems. People pay the
| price for tangible benefits like performance or
| portability. You don't need to use a fork and pay the
| technical price for it if the only benefit is that Rust
| Foundation hypothetically won't sue you for using the
| word "rust"; just frigging use "crab" as the moniker for
| "rust".
| dijit wrote:
| Its an example of a wildly successful fork due to poor
| leadership, without any other technical reasons.
|
| You can argue that "its different because its a
| community" but thats dishonest, because ultimately
| migrating an entire community is much harder than having
| an alternative development stream like MariaDB and MySQL.
|
| Oh, wait, another successful fork...
| oefrha wrote:
| IRC is practically stateless, migrating is about as easy
| as someone signing up at the new host and changing your
| readme/contact page. If you have some bots you change
| some URLs. It may not be an easy decision, but the
| migration is a straightforward one time cost. Guess why a
| lot of projects moved off Freenode overnight? Because
| it's very easy.
|
| Supporting a different language implementation, on the
| other hand, is an indefinite ongoing burden until one
| dies. Not to mention the trademark bullshit affects a
| tiny slice of the user base at best.
| dijit wrote:
| Respectfully, I couldn't possibly disagree more.
|
| Everything you said is just as true for an alternative
| language. You can maintain compat (like rocky linux) or
| diverge (like mariadb), so it remains to be seen.
|
| However the switching cost of moving your entire
| community is large and IRC is not stateless, pedantically
| it is a stateful connection, but you really mean that
| theres nothing you need to carry with you; but thats not
| true, permissions, identities, hostmasks etc. all of
| these tiny things spread across thousands is quite an
| effort and undertaking it is only done with a heavy
| heart.
|
| If you maintain compatibility then it could be as easy as
| changing a reference or just calling another compiler
| (like the Java implementations). Afaik all CentOS and
| RHEL scripts work without modification on Rocky.
|
| Either-way, I think I made my point, I am sure you are
| convinced of the inverse, so I leave this as my final
| word to other readers of the thread.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It worked for io.js when they split off from node.js. When
| io.js was re-merged in with node, the project was all the
| better for it. They ultimately improved Node's release schedule
| and cadence, governance, etc.
| insanitybit wrote:
| An issue with this analogy is that io.js addressed major
| problems that the community was aligned with. That isn't the
| case with this repo, which is just a replacement of the word
| 'rust' with 'crab'.
| colesantiago wrote:
| does the io.js fork still exist?
|
| If it is merged back into the main project or left
| unmaintained the fork failed and died.
| yarg wrote:
| If the primary goals behind the fork were achieved, to say
| that it failed and died (when it was actually reintegrated)
| is far from an accurate claim.
| Borgz wrote:
| You are implying that the only measure of success for a
| fork is for it to exist indefinitely. If the goal of io.js
| was to improve Node's governance model, which appears to be
| the case, then I would consider it a success.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > Forks of a large project seldom survive.
|
| The fork died.
|
| that is the point. goal or no goal.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It obviously didn't die. It got merged into the original
| project. That is a great end of a fork.
| colesantiago wrote:
| So it didn't survive then. Isn't that the whole point of
| what I said:
|
| > Forks of a large project seldom survive.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| But it did survive. I can't view rejoining the forked
| from repository as dying.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Who is still using the io.js fork? Nobody?
|
| That is my point.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Everyone who is using node.js is using it... Anyway you
| and I have a different idea of what it means to die. The
| identifier io.js is no longer in use. But everything that
| it actually is, is now node.js.
| insanitybit wrote:
| ok but that's a terrible point
| colesantiago wrote:
| terrible or not my point still stands, and it is a truer
| point now that nobody is using the fork that was io.js.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| If the fork achieved it's goals then it was a success.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Just look at LibreOffice. This is a fork of OpenOffice and
| OpenOffice is dead (at least to me)
| colesantiago wrote:
| OpenOffice isn't dead, they made a release a few months ago
| this year.
|
| https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/announcing-apache-
| openoff...
|
| Last commit made 3 days ago, actively maintained.
|
| https://github.com/apache/openoffice
| yarg wrote:
| https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-vs-openoffice/
|
| > Technically, both receive regular updates. But,
| OpenOffice is limited to bug fixes and minor updates.
|
| > LibreOffice has more development activity, frequent bug
| fixes/minor updates, regular major upgrades with newer
| features, and improved user experience.
|
| Apache can do whatever they want here, but the project is
| limping at best.
| [deleted]
| abenga wrote:
| c. 3 commits per day from one contributor? That's dead,
| compared to Libreoffice that has dozens per day from
| multiple contributors.
| colesantiago wrote:
| By that logic, projects like the Bohem GC is dead with
| only one full time maintainer.
|
| https://github.com/ivmai/bdwgc
| abenga wrote:
| If that were a project that needs to change as much as a
| full office suite, then yeah. It's not so much the
| absolute numbers as much as the relative numbers when
| compared with the amount of activity in Libreoffice.
| colesantiago wrote:
| A long way to admit you were wrong but ok?
| sgt wrote:
| So you went to github and saw commits made 3 days ago, then
| concluded that surely that means the project isn't dead. It
| is though, you're just completely missing the forest for
| the trees - a typical trait of programmer types.
| colesantiago wrote:
| It isn't though until they say it is discontinued.
|
| You also missed that OpenOffice made a new release and
| they were even bothered enough to make a post about it.
| Hardly a trait of dead software.
|
| As much as you would love to say it is dead:
|
| It officially isn't and it is still maintained.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| With OpenOffice all the large contributors (IBM, RedHat,
| etc.) moved to LibreOffice. Only Oracle remained with
| OpenOffice. So unless CloudFlare, Facebook, Google,
| Microsoft, etc. decide to move to the Rust fork these
| situations are not at all comparable.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Forks of a large project seldom survive
|
| MariaDB? That fork was also the result of heavy-handed
| lawyering over IP.
| pjmq wrote:
| I have absolutely 0 problems with them forking Rust off under a
| new moniker but "Crab lang" is an abomination of a name.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| Now you can use Moral Rust for your hobby CLI projects and
| Fascist Rust at work.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| ???
| Asooka wrote:
| Aww I would have picked Roost. Then instead of Cargo, you could
| have Corvo and a whole bunch of bird names for the tools.
| olgeni wrote:
| Dear God it's always drama, drama, drama, and bullshit.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Crab definitely has a better logo.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I looked in the github repo, and it seems the collective effort
| of all the 400+ commenters here is more effort than the authors
| gave to this "language".
|
| Someone just forked a repo and put on some "statements". Okay.
| There is no real effort behind this.
| vegancap wrote:
| Continually stating that they aren't 'at odds' with the Rust
| project. But, surely they are if they're creating an entirely
| separate fork? I have no skin in the Rust game, so have no
| opinion, but that strikes me as odd
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Other than the title seeming to imply Crablang is now the
| canonical language, I see no problem with this as a casual
| observer.
|
| They say they want to keep the fork in sync with "upstream", so
| they aren't trying to split the community _away_ from Rustlang,
| but to have an alternative administrative structure.
|
| Alright! That's always been a core feature of open source.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Interesting, how many negative comments this gets. People seem to
| love monoculture run by committees.
|
| This is exactly what OSS is all about. Take a code base and
| develop it into different directions. Both code and organization.
| And "natural selection" will have some forks die and others
| strife.
| jevgeni wrote:
| This is not about code, it's about standards. As long as I
| don't have to have 2 Rusts to deal with, I'm fine with this,
| but right now at least the branding isn't supporting that.
| reaperman wrote:
| If the majority of Amos (fasterthanlime), Raph Levien, Ashley
| Williams, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik throw their weight
| behind any fork of Rust, then that's where I'm putting my
| energy too.
|
| I believe they're hugely responsible for most of the adoption
| of Rust and have no doubt they'd see continued success
| anywhere they choose.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > If the majority of Amos (fasterthanlime), Raph Levien,
| Ashley Williams, Carol Nichols and Steve Klabnik throw
| their weight behind any fork of Rust
|
| But they quite dislike this fork, don't they?
| reaperman wrote:
| Ashley Williams comments were sympathetic but
| unsupportive. I haven't heard anything from the others.
|
| Based on Ashley's comments, I think the HN community has
| really overreacted to this story and treated it as
| something much bigger than it is. Im not sure there's
| anyone at all notable involved with the "crab" fork.
|
| I haven't looked into it much though, someone may correct
| me. Overall though, I'm not sure this is worthy of our
| attention.
| EyeSayUntoThee wrote:
| That's a very short-sighted way to read the room. Doubt
| has been sown at a critical Rust adoption juncture, and
| major damage has occurred, and the stench will not simply
| blow away or only stick with the forkers, it's damaged
| RUST and The Official Rust People need to wake up and
| smell some burning coffee, or the dreams of this unique
| lego just evaporating while you claim it's all a tempest
| in a teapot. Note: I have no horse in this race other
| than using Rust and wanting to have a stable unique lego
| for all things from baremetal to high level, which is
| here and being threatened by all this nonsense.
|
| HN teapot tempest = something Official Folks better heed,
| or pay the price for... problem is, this strike is
| damaging the company, and management thinks it's no big
| deal...
| cookieperson wrote:
| Maybe for now. But if it turns into the right thing their
| opinion will change.
| exitb wrote:
| Stable project structure is a requirement to survive as an
| enterprise language, which everyone tries to make it into. It
| can live with the forks, but only as a toy language.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Precisely. The naivety on display here about the realities of
| long term software development is absolutely astounding,
| especially for a project with such lofty goals. Keep your
| dirty laundry out of the public eye if you _really_ care
| about Rust.
| [deleted]
| Nanana909 wrote:
| I agree with you on the "realities of long term software
| development". But I think I believe there is a fundamental
| difference between the standard realities on a successful
| enterprise project and the _language itself_.
|
| That is, the latter needs to balance the needs of a much,
| much wider array of customers (all rust compiler users)
| versus the former with a more specific target user base.
|
| This introduces different requirements. Changes are far,
| far more likely to be permanent for example. Which means
| that the discussion around decisions needs to be different.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you can't resolve that conflict of interest then you
| have absolutely no business being near the seats of power
| for a project such as Rust. Rust needs to be perceived as
| a safe bet, not as the next Ruby, if it is to achieve the
| goals that have been put forward by those that advocated
| for the language's adoption.
| [deleted]
| johnisgood wrote:
| Toy... well, similarly to that of most Rust rewrites of long-
| established stable projects.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Or that "toy OS" Linux.
|
| Heard it all a thousand times already.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Some people still call Linux a toy OS? That is crazy
| though, it is evidently false. Oh welp.
| [deleted]
| wongarsu wrote:
| C++ survives having a GCC variant and a MSVC variant, not to
| mention whatever half-broken compiler you used to get for
| your microcontroller code.
|
| I would argue the requirement is that each compiler is a
| stable project. But one language can have multiple compilers
| that aren't 100% compatible and implement slightly different
| subsets of the language (as long as there's a common subset
| libraries can choose to stick to)
| staunton wrote:
| C++ has an ISO standard, for better or worse. That's a
| different beast. Rust is _defined_ by the implementation.
| Any hope for interoperability between potential
| adverserially competing forks is just wishful thinking.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> Rust is defined by the implementation.
|
| Hopefully not for long:
|
| https://github.com/ferrocene/specification
|
| https://ferrous-systems.com/blog/the-ferrocene-language-
| spec...
|
| Hopefully Ferrocene can lead to Rust itself being
| standardized.
|
| To me, it seems inevitable that there will be multiple
| implementations of Rust, especially if Rust continues to
| be more widely adopted and used in new domains.
|
| I would also not be surprised if Rust were to adopt
| optional language extensions for specialized use cases,
| similar to Ada's language annexes:
|
| http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22rm/html/RM-1-1-2.html
|
| Why? Because the Rust implementation you use for video
| game programming does not need all of the same features
| as the Rust implementation that you use for safety-
| critical embedded systems (for example: railroad control
| software).
| yarg wrote:
| There is a vast chasm between enterprise and toy.
|
| A thing does not need to be enterprise level to be useful or
| even very useful.
| WJW wrote:
| Perhaps, but it does need to be enterprise level (with all
| the things that come with it) if you want to be used by
| enterprises and high-grade projects like the Linux kernel.
| Many in the Rust community have explicitly stated that they
| want those type of entities to start using Rust, so being
| enterprise level is therefore a must-have.
| [deleted]
| alkonaut wrote:
| The downside to open source is the confusion around what's the
| latest, what's "most official", what's compatible with what.
|
| In 99% of cases having one project however bad it is, means
| less confusion and more stability than several (It's funny and
| scary how this is exactly the one and only argument for
| dictatorship).
|
| For the good of the project long term, evolution through
| selection might be best. But it's certainly not best for the
| short to medium term if talent is split, and it's not great for
| users to have to wonder which fork to use.
| topspin wrote:
| Agreed. I have no respect for the concern trolling about
| whatever hypothetical damage this supposedly does. If the Rust
| 'community' is so fragile that this toy fork is an actual
| problem then there is something fundamentally broken about Rust
| and its community.
| smarnach wrote:
| The thing is, nothing is developed in a different direction
| here. The fork simply merges upstream changes, and has no
| current plans of revert introducing any technical differences.
| It's a spoon, not a fork.
|
| I think it's an important aspect of free software that it can
| be forked. That doesn't me we need to celebrate all forks. Some
| are great. Some cause more harm than good. But most are simply
| irrelevant. This one appears to be in that last category.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| What made you think that you "need" to "celebrate" anything?
|
| Who told you that? Weird choice of words.
| zeteo wrote:
| Maybe it will develop into a true fork as you say. Right now it
| seems rather aimed towards influencing the committee in favor
| of a different type of monoculture.
| epolanski wrote:
| I share the spirit.
|
| OSS is all about forking.
|
| My company works with a very very niche TypeScript fork as
| well. Everyone should be free to work and contribute in the way
| he prefers for whatever reasons.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Forking a language that aims to be the long term stable
| systems language for a very large part of the IT landscape
| isn't a good thing.
| epolanski wrote:
| Why not?
|
| Competition if anything breeds more innovation.
|
| I wish someone came up, e.g., with an Elm fork.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Because the working programmers are busy enough already.
| Have them part attention at Rust vs. Crab and a part of
| them will likely just leave.
|
| All this drama and the fork likely seem extremely
| important to the parties involved but everyone else just
| wishes they would get along.
|
| As a working dev I want _one_ Rust.
| epolanski wrote:
| If some drama is the reason why people may leave Rust, I
| guess engineering is not this person's or team's
| strength.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Agreed, it's just that I seriously don't want to pay
| attention whether I should keep using Rust or switch to
| Crab. I simply don't want to care, I got plenty of work
| on my plate already.
|
| ...You know?
| arp242 wrote:
| If people think this is useful then it's their time to
| spend on it; it's not our choice to make. If you don't like
| it then you can just ignore it. I really don't see the
| problem.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's not our choice, but we can debate the choice. I
| think it's a bad choice, for many reasons, one of which
| is that having multiple competing forks that are all Rust
| but not quite isn't going to help Rust adoption and is
| going to cause fence sitters to look somewhere else.
| Whenever this kind of drama hits a language eco-system it
| is bad for the language, there is plenty of precedent.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| And if the community was confident in Rust's leadership,
| this wouldn't be happening.
|
| Which, to me, makes it seem that "hey, don't fork the
| community" is kinda brutally missing the point at hand,
| or at least feels aimed in the wrong direction.
| arp242 wrote:
| I suppose so, but I don't think the effects will be all
| that large. And we can just as much blame the Rust
| Foundation people for putting out a trademark policy
| that's completely bonkers and more strict than almost any
| trademark policy (including those from Oracle, Microsoft,
| etc.) If you don't want people to take radical actions
| then don't do radical things.
|
| Besides, a number of forks have had a positive effect on
| the original project: Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim, probably
| more.
| toyg wrote:
| ... LibreOffice, MariaDB, Openbox ... and if we consider
| forks of the community rather than raw code, we must also
| mention GNOME.
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't think they really did much for their parent
| project though? They're just forks that are more
| successful than the parent, but that's a different thing.
| My point was mostly that forking doesn't need to be a
| zero-sum game and that everyone can benefit from it.
| toyg wrote:
| I believe the now-Oracle projects benefit significantly
| from code pushed to the forked versions.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim
|
| GCC had a standard to live up to (and it extended that
| standard in plenty of ways), the others aren't languages
| per se and do not and never did have the mission to
| appeal to the people that write non-sexy system software
| for a living. They value stability and a lack of drama in
| the suppliers of their tools above all else because any
| kind of fragmentation has the potential to cause them to
| have to (much) more work and they usually already have
| plenty of that.
| [deleted]
| cookieperson wrote:
| Doesn't look like the leadership is interested in stability
| so, maybe it's a good time to consider alternatives?
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not the language that aims to be that, it's people.
| And different people have different aims.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've followed enough of the Rust debate that I'm
| suspicious of those people that have lost sight of that
| particular goal.
| scns wrote:
| This. Let a 1000 flowers bloom. There is an essay about it. To
| lazy to google it. Maybe some fellow has it bookmarked.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| About what? That phrase, that was just a trick by the Chinese
| Communists to find and kill millions of its critiques?
| sillymath3 wrote:
| There is a blog post by Peter Seibel: Let a 1,000 flowers
| bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots.
|
| It has inspired other posts, for example (2)
|
| As a hobby Lisper I learned about Peter Seibel as the author
| of Practical Common Lisp.
|
| (1) https://gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ (2)
| https://medium.com/@danonrockstar/let-a-thousand-flowers-
| blo...
| dijit wrote:
| Let a thousand flowers bloom is a common misquotation of
| Chairman Mao Zedong's "Let a hundred flowers blossom".
|
| That slogan was used in the summer of 1957 when the Chinese
| intelligentsia were invited to criticise the political system
| then obtaining in Communist China.
|
| The full quotation, taken from a speech of Mao's in Peking in
| February 1957, is:
|
| "Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of
| thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the
| arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in
| our land."
| reaperman wrote:
| Wow. In context that's really dark, given where Mao's
| leadership led those leaders of arts and sciences.
| bitwize wrote:
| This is the source of my aphorism "Every Hundred Flowers
| Campaign is immediately followed by an Anti-Rightist
| Campaign". Meaning that if your employer is effusively
| soliciting criticism or "feedback", they probably just want
| to identify and punish potential troublemakers.
| tomohawk wrote:
| And the reason for saying that was to get people to feel
| like it was ok to be critical of Mao, with the result being
| "reeducation" and death for any who did.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| You missed to mentioned that he murdered all voices that
| dared to come up with ideas.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Shortly afterwards everyone who took advantage of the
| invitation was punished. There's two theories
|
| - It was a trap
|
| - Mao didn't expect serious criticism, was surprised, and
| lashed out
| rightbyte wrote:
| If the session took place I would go for the latter. Many
| of those dictator types actually think they are that good
| at what they are doing.
| taneq wrote:
| Yep, it's amazing how fast "it's oss, if you don't like it just
| fork it and make your own version" turns into "you forked it?!
| _angery_ "
| kaba0 wrote:
| If there is no real weight behind a fork than it is either
| useless, or might even be a detriment to the whole by
| fracturing the ecosystem. I feel this is the latter kind.
| porcoda wrote:
| I like _languages_ that are a monoculture. It 's a mess when
| you have many flavors of a language. Anyone else here remember
| the joy of various Fortran variants? It was a pain in the ass -
| VMS Fortran, Cray Fortran, HPF, etc... ("How do I call a
| subroutine with a Cray Pointer" - _pointers_ were variant
| specific? Ugh). Pulling the variants together under a common
| standard made it reasonable to build projects from multiple
| groups without having to know how all of the different variants
| interacted. If you pay attention to the post-Fortran 95
| language standards, a lot of work has gone into standardizing
| what used to fall under the chaotic world of vendor specific
| extensions and implementation choices.
|
| I'm all for the diversity that emerges when you have different
| libraries and tools that take on the flavor of each group that
| builds them. But at least establish a common language in which
| to build that diverse ecosystem.
|
| It's easy when a project is new to adopt one variant and be
| happy in your little variant bubble, but when that project
| turns out to live for a while and inevitably has to start
| working with other projects or tools that rely on one of the
| other variants - you've got a headache, and life gets hard (and
| you'll probably start wishing people had just standardized
| things in the first place!)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> "How do I call a subroutine with a Cray Pointer"
|
| There's a fresh new level of hell I hope I don't get sent to
| for my sins when my time is up.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It's a mess when you have many flavors of a language.
| Anyone else here remember the joy of various Fortran
| variants?
|
| For those too young to remember Fortran: Markdown is just as
| bad. HN supports an extremely limited subset, Reddit another,
| Stackoverflow, Github and Gitlab each have their own flavors
| as well, and MediaWiki also has elements that IIRC came from
| Markdown. And that's just the biggest platforms and doesn't
| count the myriad of libraries and bindings with their unique
| subset/superset and edge cases.
| cgh wrote:
| Pascal (eg Turbo Pascal) vs Super Pascal vs Object Pascal
| also springs to mind.
| [deleted]
| nindalf wrote:
| This fork promises "All of the memory-safe features you love, now
| with 100% less bureaucracy!" Compelling, until you realise that
| all the commits are auto-merges of rust-lang/rust's main branch.
| Which means the same teams doing the same work, under a different
| name.
|
| Rust is experiencing growing pains because they're still figuring
| out a governance structure that works for everyone. They want to
| simultaneously keep the current structure of bottom up
| development where each team (compiler, lang, crates.io, cargo)
| has the autonomy to make decisions for themselves, but the
| project as a whole can speak can come to a consensus and speak
| with a single voice. That's what this RFC tries to capture
| (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfc-leadership-
| council/blob/mai...). But the project isn't there yet, and is
| making these frustrating missteps in the interim. The lack of
| transparency into these missteps manifests as "bureaucracy" to
| outsiders like us.
|
| If Crab lang actually attracted people doing the real work of
| development, they would have the exact same "bureaucracy" as
| teams tried to figure out how to build consensus and speak with
| one voice. The fact that they don't have bureaucracy is a direct
| consequence of them not doing any work right now. None of the
| crab lang people are involved in actually building Rust, as far
| as I can tell, so they might not be aware of this.
|
| Lastly, I want to note that the top comment in this thread is
| blaming the Foundation, which is simply bizarre. The Foundation
| very explicitly tries to stay hands off on technical decisions
| and does not interfere in how the teams organise themselves. You
| may disagree with that decision, but it's an inaccurate
| characterisation to blame them.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| I normally scoff at controversy-spawned "forks" but I feel like
| the more important conversation here isn't "Crablang good" or
| "Crablang will replace Rust" but, (and this is evidenced by
| Crablang popping back up again today, despite not actually
| stemming from the most recent controversy), a general,
| increasing feeling of doubt or mistrust in Rust leadership.
|
| Frankly, much as I love Rust and don't think this will
| ultimately stop its trajectory... it's really not the first
| time that folks at Rust have, how do I try to put this nicely,
| forged their own path and expected people to just deal with it.
| I _still_ have a rotten taste in my mouth about the website
| redesign, and the near gaslighting around it.
|
| (completely unsubstantiated, but I can't help wonder if any of
| this attitude falls over from Mozilla. Some of Firefox's
| treatment of user preferences and Pocket feel... well, a
| similar mix of ignorant and arrogant. shout-out to when Firefox
| had a floppy-disk-"save" icon that auto-uploaded your
| screenshot to the cloud, absolutely brilliant!!)
|
| EDIT: Welp, sure enough, there's that [one name] again,
| associated with a vastly unpopular Rust decision, going out and
| doubly down individually and casting aspersions. What a shame.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > This fork promises "All of the memory-safe features you love,
| now with 100% less bureaucracy!" Compelling, until you realise
| that all the commits are auto-merges of rust-lang/rust's main
| branch. Which means the same teams doing the same work, under a
| different name.
|
| It started out specifically as a reaction to Rust's take on
| trademarks, so shipping the exact same code with a different
| name was the _point_.
| insanitybit wrote:
| OK but it says "100% less bureaucracy", although it doesn't
| actually seem to have a plan for that. Changing the name
| is... fine? Like it's definitely a thing you can do, for
| sure.
|
| I'm not sure what that accomplishes - you can use this
| project and there's no trademark policy so... I guess you
| could abuse that if you wanted to? Like you could start your
| own "CrabCon" and no one could say anything about it
| legally... ok.
| ngngngng wrote:
| The "less bureaucracy" is the lack of the same trademark
| policy. That's literally it. They're not threatening to sue
| you if you don't include disclaimers on everything you do
| while using their language.
| insanitybit wrote:
| > The "less bureaucracy" is the lack of the same
| trademark policy. That's literally it.
|
| Right, and like I said, that's _fine_. But it 's pretty
| meaningless and actually has _literally nothing_ to do
| with the language, which has no trademarks associated
| with it (nor could it ever have such a trademark as the
| foundation does not "own" the language). So forking a
| language over a trademark that doesn't apply to a
| language makes very little sense.
|
| > They're not threatening to sue you if you don't include
| disclaimers on everything you do while using their
| language.
|
| No one is threatening to sue anyone for using the rust
| programming language. That is an extremely incorrect
| view.
|
| At best you could say there is a threat to sue someone
| _for how they use certain terms or icons_ , but this is
| completely unrelated to the language itself. It's also
| completely standard. Further, the document in question
| was a draft submitted for feedback.
|
| Almost any language is going to want trademark. Python
| recently had to deal with a troll trying to assert
| ownership over the branding because they had _not_
| defended against this. As someone mentions in an issue on
| the crab repo, How would you feel about
| a shady company posturing as "The Official Rust"
| distributing a paid copy of the compiler? Does that seems
| like a thing we as a community should allow? That's what
| the trademark policy is for: preventing shady abuses of
| our beloved lang and community.
|
| These things will absolutely happen - they have happened
| before to other languages!
|
| I think software developers just have no idea how these
| things work. You know that every LICENSE.txt is a "threat
| to sue you" by your standard?
|
| edit: Also, you're wrong. Their goals go beyond just
| removal of the trademark policy.
| dralley wrote:
| > The "less bureaucracy" is the lack of the same
| trademark policy. That's literally it. They're not
| threatening to sue you if you don't include disclaimers
| on everything you do while using their language.
|
| Neither is Rust, so we're back to this being pretty
| stupid.
| starkparker wrote:
| https://github.com/orgs/crablang/projects/4?pane=issue&itemI...
|
| > crab #51
|
| > create experimental branch
|
| > opened last week
|
| > just need to create the experimental branch
|
| > it will start from the current state of our master branch,
| which is currently synced with upstream project but afterwards
| will not receive updates unless they can be incorporated
| without too many conflicts.
| nindalf wrote:
| > This item hasn't been started
|
| Open for a week. What's the matter, they're figuring out how
| to create a git branch? It's `git branch experimental && git
| push`, and running that would have been quicker than creating
| this ticket.
|
| I wish everyone who read this thread yesterday could have
| also seen this - a shining example of the capabilities of the
| clout chasers involved in this project. They've delivered on
| their promise of "no bureaucracy" by avoiding software
| development altogether. Genius.
| dijit wrote:
| I think making a git branch which has auto-merging (but
| only if not conflicting with the upstream) is more time
| consuming than just making a branch at the current state.
|
| More likely this involves some kind of release engineering;
| anyone who has worked on large projects will tell you that
| it's not an effort to take lightly.
|
| Personally I feel like this fork is not really serious, but
| the issue might be that it either becomes serious or Rust's
| leadership will not change course.
|
| So, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and quietly
| hope that I will never need to use crablang.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > they're still figuring out a governance structure that works
| for everyone
|
| If they are indeed trying to figure out a structure that works
| for _everyone_ , I'm afraid they're pursuing a dead-end. One
| should be OK, in principle, to not aim for pleasing everyone.
| bluGill wrote:
| True, but you still need to figure out who you will please.
| Many of their directions are concerning to a lot of people.
| Even if the majority agrees with the decisions (which isn't
| clear), they can still be unhappy with the way the decision
| was made/announced.
| mrits wrote:
| I'm heavily invested into Rust and enjoy the language
| immensely. Bureaucracy and slow moving is something I'd prefer
| at this point. There are only a handful of things I actually
| want added to the language.
| bluGill wrote:
| The advantage of Bureaucracy is it gives time to think. I've
| approved several pull requests in my life that looked good
| and only latter realized while it worked it wasn't how we
| should have done things. (sometimes it takes years to see
| this, but sometimes it is quicker)
| renewiltord wrote:
| I really like reading/writing Rust, but stay away from the
| community. Highest drama mainstream lang community ever but
| they've created a pretty good ecosystem.
|
| Except for the actix fiasco, it's generally been quite chill as a
| user. You float above the twisting nether and grab what it throws
| out, which is pretty good.
| lucidone wrote:
| Haven't ever used Rust and probably won't. Regardless, the
| melodramatic cliquey "I'm leaving the project" bluster as of late
| reminds me of my 14 year old self on various vbulletin forums and
| grants me conviction avoiding adopting this language and its
| ecosystem. I prefer the tools I use for building businesses to be
| administered by adults.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> the melodramatic cliquey "I'm leaving the project" bluster
| as of late...
|
| That may be good. It a narcissistic trait and they are leaving
| the project.
| spoiler wrote:
| Honestly, the language and the community are mostly great.
| There's a few outliers that aggressively want to draw
| attention to themselves (which is inherently narcissistic).
|
| That's not something that's unique to Rust in particular,
| every community has those. Rust's is still relatively small
| given it's only had a big uptick of users Recently. It'll
| settle eventually; it always does.
|
| Also, I don't tend to interact or pay much attention to the
| bad apples in the community. So, I guess I'm just not that
| bothered by them. Ignoring them is the worst thing you can do
| to narcissists and idiots; it makes them go away to leech
| elsewhere.
|
| Whether it's Rust or Crab I am not particularly bothered; the
| technical side of the language are a boon in themselves.
| cies wrote:
| So what is administered by adults? JVM/Java? Well that has it's
| own share of drama (and businesses frowning upon the leadership
| of Oracle). For .NET/C# I cannot remember any drama, but maybe
| that's just MSFT controlling the PR of _their_ project?
|
| The more something is governed in the open, the more we can see
| problems. To me that's a good thing. Compare Germany's govt to
| China's: Germany is certainly not as efficient, but it's
| transparency allows many to see it's inner workings are comment
| about it. I hope in the long run this transparency is what
| businesses prefer in an open source project.
| codeflo wrote:
| For anyone critizing this: From the trademark bullshit to the
| conference drama, it's clear at this point that someone with
| influence in the Rust foundation is behaving like an asshole and
| damaging the project. That can happen in open source, see
| Stallman and others.
|
| It's also clear that others at the Rust foundation tolerate this
| behavior, downplay it, don't understand the impact, don't want to
| go against a "respected contributor", don't want to lose their
| own position of influence, or behave too much like sheep to stand
| up for what's right. Moves like these target _them_. This sends
| the message "fix this or the community will move on".
|
| Credible threats of a hostile fork have sometimes worked in the
| past to get a steering committee to fix their shit, see
| Node.js/io.js. It's no guarantee, but it's one of the very few
| weapons a community has if a project's leadership remains
| stubborn.
| TotempaaltJ wrote:
| I think it's worth reiterating here that there are two separate
| entities at play in the Rust community.
|
| First, there's the Rust Project, a (non-incorporated) group of
| people that actually maintain the language and surrounding
| assets. They've been undergoing a "crisis of governance" for a
| couple of years now from what I can tell, and they're working
| on a new governance structure. This is where the moderation
| team resignation happened, and just a few days ago the RustConf
| drama.
|
| Then there's the Rust Foundation, which is an incorporated
| entity and the legal owner of Rust's trademarks. They manage
| (corporate) funding/donations, issue grants, and manage some
| infrastructure stuff. IIRC, they have no official influence in
| the Rust Project (and by extension, in the language). This is
| where the recent trademark policy drama originated.
|
| To be quite honest, I think this separation is super confusing
| and it should be delineated more clearly.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It's clear that there's some collosal incompetence, but malice
| is not at all clear. Most of the recent drama plausibly boils
| down to communication failure. They're going to fix this,
| eventually.
| pietro72ohboy wrote:
| > That can happen in open source, see Stallman and others.
|
| Could you elaborate on because I'm increasingly seeing Stallman
| being thrown around as a bogeyman who impeded FOSS progress for
| years if not decades and I really dislike this trend. It seems
| that his personal views (which I do not support) and
| eccentricity is being conflated with his contributions to FOSS.
| I will preface this by noting that this is "my belief" but
| Stallman has been a positive force in ensuring that consumers
| today can work, play and do practically anything on a largely
| free platform. Via the FSF, his contributions towards the GPL
| license series ensures that contributions to the Linux kernel
| stay open allowing the kernel to improve as a whole.
| arp242 wrote:
| I wrote about this a few years ago in [1]. I think some of
| the more recent personal attacks have been unfair and
| misguided, but criticism of Stallman goes back decades. Why
| does X use the MIT license and not GPL? Because they found
| Stallman too difficult to talk to (see quote in the article).
| Many prominent people involved in Free Software have been at
| odds with Stallman for a long time. When I first heard of
| Stallman in an interview sometime in the early 2000s I
| compared him to Osama Bin Laden in terms of extremism, which
| was a mean and wrong thing to do and I'm sorry I did that (I
| was young...), but it's indicative of the kind of responses
| he's evoked for a long time. Some of his ideas are good, but
| many are also silly, and some downright misguided.
|
| You can have good ideas _and_ be a bad leader of a movement.
| These two things are not mutually exclusive. A wiser and less
| ego-centric Stallman would have stepped back decades ago.
|
| [1]: https://www.arp242.net/rms.html
| toyg wrote:
| _> A wiser and less ego-centric Stallman would have stepped
| back decades ago._
|
| I don't agree. For all his limits, Stallman maintained an
| ideological purity that is required to firmly signpost one
| end of the Overton window. Opensource licenses and projects
| can mix and match rights and regulations, but you will
| always have an unwatered GPL option, there to remind people
| of what the original ideal looked like.
|
| Compare the trajectory of the GNU project with that of
| Mozilla, for example. Mozilla compromised ideals to gain
| popularity, and now that popularity is waning the
| compromise gets worse and worse (pocket, pop-unders...).
| GNU compromised nothing, ignored ebbs and flows in
| popularity, and will continue to do their thankless work
| for the good of the community at large.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| The puny weak souls shudders in the sight of an
| unbreakable mind
| dale_glass wrote:
| I don't think ideological purity is the problem here.
| liotier wrote:
| Ideological purity is the point. A whole range of other
| options are available but ideological purity is what
| Stallman offers, with no expectation that everyone will
| appreciate its benefits.
|
| The very existence of the FSF's offerings is necessary to
| understand what other positions compromise to obtain
| other benefits.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Okay, but Stallman's non-purity related bad qualities are
| a problem for his own mission.
|
| Eg, Stallman is reported as creeping women out in the
| link above. That has nothing to do with his
| uncompromising ideals regarding software.
|
| So maybe Stallman could quietly retire to some sort of
| metaphorical ivory tower, and keep producing
| uncompromising ideology, which could be then evangelized
| by somebody less creepy. There's no need for compromise
| even. The same ideology just has to be delivered by
| somebody with better people skills.
|
| I think that'd be a win/win.
| esarbe wrote:
| It would be good if you would not repeat unsubstantiated
| rumors.
|
| No credible allegation have brought forward against
| Stallman's behavior regarding women. It's all hearsay and
| we should avoid hearsay and rumors.
| dale_glass wrote:
| I don't mean to imply he committed a crime. I'm saying
| that he's odd and offputting to many people, which is
| hardly news. And while I've not seen him recently in
| person, everything I've read firmly indicate that he's
| very stuck in the past and his manners are not up to
| modern standards.
| esarbe wrote:
| Sure, no harm done. Stallman is odd, no argument about
| that.
| arp242 wrote:
| That would be ideal, yes. But there also needs to be a
| bit of a culture change away from Stallmanism ("we want
| absolute Software Freedom _now_ and anything even
| slightly short of that is _unethical_!) to a more
| pragmatic attitude and outlook.
|
| This starts with simple things like not picking fights
| with the BSD projects only because they allow non-free
| software in ports and not alienating many lead developers
| of the most successful project that uses your license
| (Linux).
| toyg wrote:
| Lol, this has been said over and over basically since GNU
| existed. "You need to compromise!!!11!!one!".
|
| FSF and GNU are not about compromises. If they were,
| they'd have stuck to the original Unix distributions and
| all their licensing grey areas. Instead they didn't, and
| the world is better for it. Why should they change
| now...?
| arp242 wrote:
| > Instead they didn't, and the world is better for it.
| Why should they change now...?
|
| So this is where we fundamentally disagree: I do not
| think the world is better off with an uncompromising FSF.
| I think the world and state of Free Software would have
| been significantly more advanced if they had adopted a
| more pragmatic attitude. I don't think that's
| "compromising" per se, but rather accepting that things
| don't change in a day.
|
| Also consider an alternative universe where the FSF
| and/or GNU had invested in to a good code hosting
| platform and a system to setup payments for people
| developing software instead of the ecosystem rolling from
| one proprietary platform to another over the last 25
| years.
| toyg wrote:
| I mean, no hard FSF/GNU, no GPL, no Linux - with only the
| BSD/MIT license around, any good kernel feature would
| have been simply coopted and repackaged like the TCP
| stack was, keeping commercial software always ahead. From
| that perspective, the world is undoubtedly better off
| like this. Even the projects that compromised just a
| little bit with LGPL often got swallowed: see KHTML, for
| example.
|
| _> consider an alternative universe where the FSF and
| /or GNU had invested in to a good code hosting platform_
|
| FSF/GNU were created by nerdy hippies, expecting them to
| ever be great at running such a service is unrealistic.
| Besides, they _did_ provide platforms, they just were
| never as good as commercial alternatives.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" Might be a
| saying to reflect on for a bit.
|
| Also aside from that he was an enormous asshole to
| people, which damaged his own goals, and is just wrong.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Ideological purity is the point._
|
| Can a person be ideologically pure and not be an asshole?
| Or do the two go together (as is alleged with Stallman)?
| psd1 wrote:
| The Dalai Lama. Perhaps Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn?
| Hamuko wrote:
| The assholes are probably firmly inside the union in the
| Venn diagram of "ideologically pure" and "vocal
| advocates".
| teekert wrote:
| I agree with throw0101bm but then there are people like
| Henry Cavill.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| What's the Cavill reference?
| teekert wrote:
| Henry Cavill is vocal (but kind and respecting) and an
| "ideologically pure" geek, in the sense that he seems to
| try and change scripts of series and movies he plays in,
| where they overlap with his nerdiness, ie [0], but there
| are more references. Of course, this is true in so far as
| geekiness can be seen as an ideology, if so, Cavill is
| pretty pure and vocal, but also just a great guy it
| seems. Now he's going for a Warhammer 40k series and
| people are looking forward to it, because he knows his
| s*.
|
| [0] https://redanianintelligence.com/2021/12/09/henry-
| cavill-add...
| Hamuko wrote:
| I thought that the rumours were that other people in the
| production of The Witcher show were not fans of Cavill
| trying to change the scripts?
| dagw wrote:
| Basically Cavill wanted the show to closely follow the
| books (books he was a huge fan of), and the show runners
| wanted to make changes to the stories and go in a
| different direction. This lead to a lot of arguments, and
| eventually Cavill being replaced.
| dagw wrote:
| Come on! Cavill took a nice big pay check from Netflix
| and filmed 3 seasons of that show, fulfilling his
| contract like a pragmatic professional. I have no doubt
| that Cavill is a nice guy that cares about the things he
| claims to care about, but had he truly been 'pure' in the
| senes we are talking about he would have walked away a
| soon as he didn't get his way and not cared about his
| contract or future career.
| AwaAwa wrote:
| Considering the hate against him by the entrenched non-
| fans that are seeking profit off the franchise, it is
| pretty obvious what his 'compromising' 'kind' ways got
| him. That he was well paid, and can use that as
| insulation is very much an outlier to the way things
| usually go, i.e. tar and feathering of Stallman.
| pjlegato wrote:
| As a direct result of Stallman's uncompromising
| disinterest in what values people in the broader world
| actually wanted to engage with -- instead attempting to
| dictate his own moral views as a petty tyrant -- GNU _as
| a project_ hasn't been relevant to computing for decades.
|
| When was the last time you booted up the Hurd kernel? I
| would be surprised if more than 10% of HN readers even
| know what that is. (Stallman actually summarily dismissed
| Hurd's lead developer when he dared to criticize the GFDL
| in public. https://lwn.net/Articles/59147/)
|
| Stallman's abrasive and confrontational posturing is
| related to but distinct from his ideological goals. His
| rude posturing actually _damaged_ the chances of ever
| reaching those goals.
|
| Even the GNU "copyleft" license -- the project's greatest
| success in terms of "actually impacting the world" -- has
| fallen more and more into disuse in favor of less
| restrictive licenses such as BSD and MIT.
| kevviiinn wrote:
| AFAIK the Hurd kernel isn't ready for production because
| Linux is so solid so it hasn't been focused on
| ebiester wrote:
| That is true today, but Linux didn't have that much of a
| lead. People chose to develop for Linux instead when the
| future was in doubt, and that was largely due to the
| pragmatism of Linus.
| arp242 wrote:
| GNU wants to recreate a 1988 Unix. That's not necessarily
| a bad thing - I'm an old Unix beardy type myself as well
| - but it's not really how you stay at the forefront of
| computing, yeah. Also didn't help Stallman alienated the
| GNOME and GTK people so they're not longer GNU projects
| (and they were independent for a long time before that
| anyway).
|
| There are still some important GNU projects though, GCC,
| GNU libc, and Grub being the most notable.
| dralley wrote:
| >There are still some important GNU projects though, GCC,
| GNU libc, and Grub being the most notable.
|
| Except he's pissed off most of those people too.
| toyg wrote:
| _> didn 't help Stallman alienated the GNOME and GTK
| people_
|
| I don't know the details but, I mean, GNOME/GTK people
| themselves have been very good at alienating folks of all
| sorts...
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| I agree. Stallman can be subborn and arrogant and he
| often rubs people the wrong way. It is a character flaw
| just as it is a character flaw to not be able to seperate
| these issues from the ideas proposed. People that demand
| a sanitized environment have their flaws as well and I
| believe them to be far more detrimental.
|
| People demanding his resignation would probably have
| installed a far less effective and competent leader. I
| also thought about Mozilla here that tried to set a new
| course which is as pale as the next corporate
| environment.
|
| People that tarred Stallman certainly would be
| insufficient in any leadership position even with
| Stallmans perhaps very eccentric flaws.
| arp242 wrote:
| It's about effective advocacy. Stallman can think or do
| whatever he wants, but he is not and has never been an
| effective advocate.
|
| And from an advocacy position, ideological purity almost
| never works. An advocacy organisation like the FSF should
| be pragmatically "climbing the ladder" one step at a
| time, not insisting on an instantaneous revolution. You
| might as well advocate for the moon to be painted blue:
| it's just not going to happen, no matter how right you
| are.
|
| You absolutely can achieve short-term wins without losing
| the long-term picture. The idea that any compromise
| somehow diminishes the longer term ideals is just wrong.
| Consider a law that states that purchasing software
| _must_ come with the source code (under any proprietary
| license /NDA) as a matter of "right to repair". This
| would be a complete non-starter for ideological purists
| because it's not _True Freedom_ , but clearly it would be
| a huge improvement over the current situation. This is
| how the ideological purity is impeding progress.
|
| The reasons for Firefox's decline are unrelated to
| "compromised ideals" (which have IMO been hugely
| overstated in the first place). Quite frankly, no one
| cares about any of this outside of a relatively small
| group of people. If Mozilla had been more "ideologically
| pure" they never would have implemented DRM and would be
| considerably more irrelevant today. If you think "oh,
| this new browser has more _Freedom_ (a concept you need
| to spend 10 minutes explaining in the first place) but
| you can 't watch Netflix with it" is going to convince
| many people then you're sorely mistaken.
|
| The fact is: Firefox started declining as Chrome was just
| a better browser. That's all there is to it. Firefox
| Quantum significantly improved things, but it seems it
| was "too little, too late". All the cases where Free
| Software is a resounding success is because it's the best
| possible software for the problem, and the cases where
| it's _not_ is because it 's _not_ the best software for
| the problem.
|
| Free Software will succeed if it's the best solution, so
| that's where the effort should go, not the (frequently
| minor or even petty) stuff Stallman keeps banging on
| about.
|
| _Edit_ : the fact that this got downvoted in less than a
| minute - hardly enough time to actually read the post -
| is also part of the problem. I don't really care about
| downvotes, but it's indicative of the kind of _hostility_
| that makes these kind of internal community discussions
| hard. My article that I previously mentioned got posted
| to HN, where it was promptly flagged[1], seemingly
| because some pro-Stallman people were upset by it. Fine,
| whatever, I didn 't even care enough to email dang about
| it, but it does make these discussions a lot less
| constructive than they can be. I received more emails and
| private communication about this article than everything
| else on my website combined, almost all positive by
| people who appreciated a more nuanced take than "Stallman
| == atrocious" or "Stallman == secondComing(Jesus)", so
| clearly it wasn't all that bad. But on HN it was
| "censored" - for lack of a better word. I'm not directing
| this at you - your comment was constructive and fine -
| but _in general_ it can be hard to have these
| discussions.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26579225
| bee_rider wrote:
| Firefox is competing with a product of the world's
| largest advertising company, I'd tend to assume that,
| rather than technical merit, is where it fell behind.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Stallman can think or do whatever he wants, but he is
| not and has never been an effective advocate.
|
| Stallman has been right more often then wrong and has
| made his points forcefully, consistent and without
| compromise over _decades_. He 's backed up his words with
| his deeds, has contributed an incredible amount of
| software and has been a very important factor in
| jumpstarting the free software movement. He provided a
| framework and a set of mechanisms for sharing software in
| a way that effectively aligns the rights of various
| parties, has convinced millions of programmers to give
| away the fruit of their labor for the betterment of the
| world in general and the relationship of end users with
| software in particular.
|
| I really don't see what else one could wish for in an
| effective advocate.
| arp242 wrote:
| Someone who doesn't alienate a significant part of the
| community would be a good start (which all occurred long
| before the whole business with the Minsky comments). That
| he jump-started things or "is right" isn't actually all
| that important for effective advocacy; if I were to start
| my reply with "you asshole!" then you're not very likely
| to listen to what I have to say. To be honest I don't
| understand how people fail to understand there's a
| difference between "being right" and "being someone
| people listen to".
| toyg wrote:
| "Nobody listens to him" and still the likes of Microsoft
| now develop predominantly in the open.
|
| You don't need to persuade everyone, sometimes it's just
| enough to _witness_ your truth. Ask christians.
| arp242 wrote:
| > "Nobody listens to him" and still the likes of
| Microsoft now develop predominantly in the open.
|
| Stallman had exactly zero influence on that shift.
| toyg wrote:
| That shift is the result of millions of other little
| shifts made over the last 4 decades, which he definitely
| had a hand in enabling.
| psd1 wrote:
| Not inducing the backlash effect, probably.
|
| I have spent too long being right but an arsehole. I
| never got my ideas into production that way, even though
| the existing codebase was patently a trough of piss. I
| learned to stfu and, generally, they came round. Don't
| rub people's noses in it, especially if they make
| decisions you care about.
|
| There is almost no issue so black-and-white that a person
| can't find a technical justification for any given point
| of view. So don't drive people to oppose you from simple
| bloody-mindedness.
| alexvoda wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't even believe Stallman is as
| ideologically pure as people like too believe he is. I
| think he is much more attached to his own ideas and
| realisations than he is to the overarching idea of
| software freedom.
|
| And to support that argument I bring three anecdotes.
|
| 1. He is much more attached to his own creation, the GPL,
| as a tool for driving software freedom and as a "hack" on
| top of copyright. As such, he is pro-copyright and pro-IP
| (intellectual property) in general (but against just
| software patents). Because without copyright the GPL
| could not exist. But without intellectual property,
| everything becomes reverse engineer-able and decompile-
| able and any available source code is effectively free.
| Copyleft and the GPL are not enforceable in a world
| without copyright but they are also not as necessary. I
| confirmed this position directly with him and also
| through the articles he wrote.
|
| 2. He is more attached to the GPL as his brainchild than
| any other variant. As such the AGPL (not created by him)
| has always been a bastard cousin and his organisation
| never bothered to create a LAGPL (like the LGPL and AGPL
| combined) even though it was requested several times. The
| GPL has allowed the rise of SaaS and the AGPL is
| unpopular because of how strict it is and therefore it
| was rarely used. A LAGPL would have been a middle option
| that would have forced SaaS corporations to contribute
| back to the community and could have had a grater impact
| than the AGPL.
|
| 3. With regards to microcode his position is asinine. He
| would prefer hardware for which the user is simply unable
| to change the microcode (even if it is broken) just to
| avoid blobs. He is not pushing for opening up the blobs.
| He is not pushing for Free as in freedom microcode. He is
| not pushing for reverse engineering the blobs.
| toyg wrote:
| 1. Obviously you don't need licenses without copyright;
| but copyright will never go away, it's just too good an
| invention for too many fields of endeavour. FSF and GNU
| have never been anti-copyright and never will be, and
| that's just fine.
|
| 2. Nobody stops anybody from creating new licenses, in
| fact many many projects tried to do just that (MPL etc).
| Most of them fail simply because you cannot have your
| cake and eat it too, you either allow some things or you
| don't. You either require source code for programs users
| interact with on the network, or you don't; I'm not sure
| what middle ground is there to find. If you want to
| release certain parts of a website but not others, you
| can do it already in many areas - any SPA client-side
| code can be covered by GPL 3, for example. AGPL in many
| ways was a proto-GPL3, and it's to the FSF's credit that
| they didn't drop it, but actually updated it when v3 came
| about. They even try to explain the differences with
| dedicated documentation [0].
|
| [0] https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-
| fundamentals-of-t...
| arp242 wrote:
| Yes, I agree; that's what I meant with "ego-centric". [1]
| is a good example: _" It is OK to call it GNU when you
| want to be really short, but it is better to call it
| GNU/Linux so as to give Torvalds some credit"_.
| Seriously? Calling some Linux distro "GNU" is "OK"? How
| gracious that he wants to give this little upstart
| student from Finland "some credit" as well.
|
| As for microcode: IMHO Stallman is just wrong about it.
| He's okay with the logic being in hardware or non-
| volatile ROM, but uploading the code to volatile RAM when
| the hardware starts is a huge problem? I don't follow
| that logic. Of course it would be _better_ if this was
| open, but it 's much less of a deal than he makes it out
| to be.
|
| [1]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/incorrect-quotation.html
| riffraff wrote:
| how would an LAGPL work? I'm sure it's my limitation, but
| I fail to understand the space in which it would be
| useful.
| martin8412 wrote:
| Re: microcode you're so right. The Librem 5 phone is
| expected to be certified as respecting your freedom by
| FSF, but the Pinephone is not. Both use proprietary
| firmware, but because the Librem 5 loads the firmware
| from a chip that can't be updated by the host CPU, then
| that's apparently okay. Pinephone simply loads it from
| /lib/firmware
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| I disagree. The proposition of source being delivered
| with any software is indeed unrealistic, but not a bad
| starting point.
|
| For software that is funded publically these requirements
| could be realistic for example. Consumers won't demand it
| of course, but especially when software goes out of
| maintenance, it would be a huge help to get the source.
| Unrealistic with copyright protections, but I see the new
| gang of questionable FSF advocates far more critically.
|
| I didn't downvote you, but I believe your are just wrong
| here.
| arp242 wrote:
| "Source delivered" can mean many different things though.
| Stallman's position is essentially that the source must
| be delivered in a way that respects the four freedoms and
| any compromise on that is "unethical" and not worth
| pursuing. My position is that we should start with just
| having access to the source under _any_ terms, no matter
| how restrictive, and then move from there.
|
| > I didn't downvote you
|
| Just to clarify: I wouldn't mind if you did. It was just
| an observation about the knee-jerk response from someone
| who clearly hasn't even bothered to read the comment.
| toyg wrote:
| _> we should start with just having access to the source
| under any terms_
|
| Lol. Windows source code has been available under
| severely-restricted terms, officially for academic
| purposes, for what, 20 years? It didn't do any good.
|
| I've seen these debates for 25 years by now, they are
| always the same.
| arp242 wrote:
| What I mean is "required to ship it with every copy as a
| matter of right to repair", as I mentioned a few comments
| early.
| toyg wrote:
| There is no "right to repair" without the 4 freedoms. You
| can't "repair" if you cannot inspect and run (0 and 1),
| and your repair is fundamentally meaningless if you
| cannot communicate it (2 and 3).
| arp242 wrote:
| > your repair is fundamentally meaningless if you cannot
| communicate it (2 and 3).
|
| I have spent significant amount of time working around
| bugs and limitations in proprietary software that could
| have been fixed easily otherwise, and simply being able
| to fix it for myself or our company would absolutely be
| beneficial.
|
| This is so staggeringly blindly obvious that it pains me
| that this is even a point of contention. Of course things
| would be _better_ if you can also share, but merely being
| able to repair is _also_ useful in and of itself. This is
| exactly the sort of Stallmanistic attitude that 's
| impeding any sort of progress, and why we'll still be
| having the same discussion 30 years from now with no
| significant movement in the grand scheme of things.
| toyg wrote:
| _> simply being able to fix it for myself or our company
| would absolutely be beneficial._
|
| That's basically the old Unix model, in practice it was
| unsatisfactory to the point that... people just wrote
| their own Unix and made a point that fixes should be
| public - and we got GNU.
|
| Companies could give you the old Unix model tomorrow, if
| they so wished; but it's effectively lose-lose, because
| they don't gain anything meaningful (if anything, their
| support costs are increased by having to deal with
| thousands of potential user-introduced variations) and
| you don't gain anything meaningful either - your fix is
| forgotten the minute you move on and you won't be able to
| use it with your next employer.
| evilotto wrote:
| X is an interesting case. It was released with a permissive
| license and the Free Software people argued against it
| saying that the vendors (Sun, IBM, HP, SGI, etc.) would
| take it and make a dozen different incompatible versions
| without sharing any improvements. And that is exactly what
| happened. The state-of-the-art was arguably held back by a
| decade because of the permissive license.
| johnisgood wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36108633 [1]
|
| Guess who's the common denominator here? Yup. JeanHeyd. Such
| a small world.
|
| [1] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235124.html
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| Yea, it's good to see someone consistently pushing back
| against hate and refusing to give up or be silenced.
| srslack wrote:
| That's a funny definition of "hate" you have there.
| pydry wrote:
| He doesnt seem to be liked by some of the more powerful,
| corporate entities in tech, probably because he pushes some
| agendas that are somewhat anti-their-profits.
|
| I think this was behind the rather unsuccessful attempts to
| cancel him a few years ago, which cast a shadow over his
| reputation.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > He doesnt seem to be liked by some of the more powerful,
| corporate entities in tech, probably because he pushes some
| agendas that are somewhat anti-their-profits
|
| I don't think any of those corporate entities care about
| Stallman in the slightest.
|
| At least 95% of the time you hear talk about him even in
| technical forums it's the "why is he still around" sort of
| controversy in various forms. You almost never hear about
| him _doing_ something that could be described as positive
| leadership that could make any competition worry.
|
| I highly doubt anybody at those powerful, corporate
| entities even keep track of what he's doing, let alone has
| any concerns for their profits because of him.
|
| > I think this was behind the rather unsuccessful attempts
| to cancel him a few years ago, which cast a shadow over his
| reputation.
|
| The attempts to get him out I think come mostly from the
| Free Software community itself who to a large extent wants
| a better and less embarrassing leadership.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I heard Stallman speak once about FOSS. He struck me as a
| very interesting person, but not very flexible in his
| views. Even if he's 100% "right" in the long run about how
| digital products should be completely free, his views are
| so polarizing that it'd be hard to interact with him long
| enough to understand his positions.
| tombert wrote:
| I think there is value in people like Stallman existing.
| I disagree with him in a lot of regards, but I think it's
| important for people like him to shift the "Overton
| Window" of software copyright a bit closer to FOSS. He's
| a disagreeable bastard, I'm not even sure he would
| dispute that, but a part of me does respect the
| dedication to the cause.
|
| That said, I almost always use BSD or MIT licenses for my
| personal stuff; sometimes I use the Eclipse one because
| that's the default that Leiningen gives me for Clojure
| and I can't really be bothered.
| detourdog wrote:
| That captures my sentiment exactly and GPL is always the
| last choice for me.
| pydry wrote:
| For the last 30 years a strong belief in anthropogenic
| global warming has been polarizing too.
|
| Sometimes appeals to moderation are valid, but I think
| sometimes it is entirely the wrong thing to do.
| detourdog wrote:
| Idealism retards the growth of most good ideas. I suffer
| this daily but it is an internal struggle and I structure
| my idealism to minimize the impact on others.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| The first one that comers to mind is when he refused to allow
| changes to gcc to expose the AST:
| https://lwn.net/Articles/629259/ , and this came up in
| another thread a while back: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-
| ml/gcc/2001-02/msg00895.html
|
| There was also the whole egcs thing.
| jbirer wrote:
| [flagged]
| goodpoint wrote:
| This has nothing to do with the GPL. For more than two
| decades Stallman has been described as a terrible public
| speaker by most people who met him in person. He has many
| strange quirks and can be very brash. He himself admits being
| very tone deaf.
| tristramb wrote:
| I think it probably took an awkward misfit to create the
| GNU propject and the GPL in the first place. I am reminded
| of "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the
| unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to
| himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable
| man." (Maxims for Revolutionists by George Bernard Shaw)
| goodpoint wrote:
| No, GPL is the product of the existing hacker culture.
| Thousands of people were involved in the early FOSS
| movement.
| detourdog wrote:
| Stallman is a pillar of our community for better or worse he
| insisted on the availability of a free c compiler with source
| code. He is too extreme for my tastes but deserves a base
| level of respect despite himself.
| danielheath wrote:
| I'm thankful to Stallman for his many contributions to the
| field - (software, legal, moral writings, etc). I am better
| off for his work, as are most living humans.
|
| However, there's a pretty large number of perfectly
| reasonable-seeming people who refuse to spend any time
| interacting with him, either in person or online. His
| reputation, fairly or otherwise, is terrible.
|
| Maybe that's deserved, maybe it's undeserved - but it's the
| reputation he has, and that reputation is enough to seriously
| discourage people from getting involved in the FSF in any
| capacity.
| codeflo wrote:
| > his personal views (which I do not support) and
| eccentricity
|
| Oh wow. That's some downplaying of the actual issue, which I
| won't make explicit because it's absolutely disgusting. The
| guy made himself and his foundation untouchable for anyone
| with a reputation to lose, leading to a lot of effort going
| into "de-GNU-ification" of technology stacks.
|
| > Stallman has been a positive force
|
| It's very hard to make this kind of argument for anything he
| has done in the last 15 years. Two quick points: The version
| of the GPL that continues to enable the success of Linux is
| one that Stallman now explicitly disapproves of. And you
| might have noticed not a single one of the recent successful
| programming languages uses GCC as the default backend --
| there's a whole history of Stallman intervention in the
| project and resulting idiotic architecture decisions behind
| why that's the case.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > leading to a lot of effort going into "de-GNU-ification"
| of technology stacks.
|
| De-GNU-ification was mostly about GPLv3, not Stallman. Some
| of this was pushed by Apple, so they can use free software
| without copyleft requirements.
| arp242 wrote:
| Technical issues were another reason; Stallman
| intentionally made GCC worse to prevent possible abuse
| (mostly based on unfounded fears, IMHO), some GNU tools
| are not well suited for all environments ("bloated", for
| lack of a better term), and there have been some
| governance issues (e.g. GNU libc was notorious for a long
| time, but also copyright assignments to the FSF, bad
| technical decisions being made for purely ideological
| reasons).
|
| Also, Apple pretty much proposed to transfer LLVM to the
| FSF: _" If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a
| long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM
| community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM
| itself to the FSF and we can work through these
| details."_[1] which was basically just ignored. That was
| in 2005 before GPLv3, but it shows that Apple wasn't
| against copyleft out of principle and that a small bit of
| pragmatism would have prevented the alienation of Apple,
| as well as many other organisations and people. All that
| for the very small benefit the controversial clauses in
| GPLv3 give us. Well done people.
|
| [1]: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-
| ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html
| modo_mario wrote:
| >there's a whole history of Stallman intervention in the
| project and resulting idiotic architecture decisions behind
| why that's the case.
|
| Could you expand on this? I still see him in a somewhat
| positive light because whilst his aspergers makes him not
| an optimal face to an organization his dogmatism regarding
| free software and the FSF's efforts in court and elsewhere
| have proven largely a good thing imo and I don't really
| fault him for his corporate opponents that stem from that.
| Meanwhile a lot of the accusations turned out weirdly
| fabricated which left me a bit of a bad taste,
| inconsequential or were regarding statements he'd
| apologized for and publicly changed his views on with
| explanation as to why and how.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Stallman can be blamed for the rise of Clang, basically.
|
| He for instance prominently refused to have GCC dump the
| full AST because of concerns of what people might do with
| that which could infringe on software freedom:
|
| https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
| devel/2015-01/msg00...
|
| And that sort of thing suddenly made the non-GPL
| competition relevant and better.
|
| Now LLVM isn't a tragedy by any means, it's an excellent
| piece of software. But here we can see Stallman
| sabotaging his own mission, and resulting in alternatives
| to GCC being popularized, and written under licenses less
| favorable to FSF's mission.
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm sure he is just playing the long game.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > with his contributions to FOSS
|
| It is not as noteworthy as well known his name is. Especially
| if you count how many have stopped working on open-source
| projects because of him.
| unconed wrote:
| Can you name a few of these luminaries to see what we've
| lost?
|
| Most of what I've heard about Stallman are social attacks
| from autistic mean girls with zero self awareness.
|
| Edit: FYI, people have flagged my follow up comment where I
| address the request for clarification to make it look like
| there is none. Just turn on showdead in your HN options to
| see. This is exactly the kind of playbook they love to use.
| Manipulative, dishonest and pathetic.
|
| https://acko.net/blog/on-sperging-out/
| jakear wrote:
| Quite extreme words to provide no reference supporting
| them.
| unconed wrote:
| [flagged]
| eyko wrote:
| I've met and hung out quite a bit with Stallman (as part
| of a conference organizers group) in the early 2000s and
| he wasn't the most self aware person when it came to
| social situations. He is very socially awkward.
| Everything I've read so far has seemed plausible,
| although I would also agree that it seems to be blown out
| of proportion. He is one of the kindest persons I've met,
| very idealistic, and a captivating personality. It's just
| super socially awkward being around him. Sometimes
| straight up uncomfortable.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Do they still use the term socially awkward to describe
| nerdy people who work in IT? I thought it was quite on
| point, at least back in the days.
| eyko wrote:
| I'm not sure tbh (English being my second language), but
| I guess I would? I mean, we were all very young and very
| nerdy and thought it was pretty cool to be having dinner
| with RMS himself. Still, by our nerdy standards, he stood
| out as being a bit awkward - perhaps partly due to the
| language and cultural differences (even though he spoke
| pretty decent Spanish).
| johnisgood wrote:
| Maybe he is on the spectrum. I probably am, although I
| have never bothered with a diagnosis.
| Nanana909 wrote:
| Agree on all points. Something needs to change in the Rust
| foundation fundamentally.
|
| But as far as forks go this one seems quite low effort. Does
| the tactic work if the other side knows what you're doing?
|
| From Ashley Williams, former founding member of the Rust
| Foundation (I don't support her pretentious tone here)[1]:
|
| > "I don't think any of the folks who are part of it are
| language designers," said Williams. "They didn't even do a full
| find-and-replace on the word 'rust' the repo. But the community
| doesn't have a lot of recourse in situations like this besides
| making kind of ridiculous gestures [to say] 'hey, we want you
| to engage with us differently.'"
|
| Personally I'd be interested in ideas for alternate governance
| models for Rust. Should package maintainers with over a certain
| threshold of users be given votes? Could strike the balance
| between complete direct democracy anarchy and an opaque small
| group making the choices.
|
| [1]
| https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/04/17/rust_foundation_a...
| arp242 wrote:
| What a dismissive comment. I was unaware you're not able to
| work on a programming language until you get your _Certified
| Language Designer(tm)(r)_ certification.
| brabel wrote:
| The author of that comment is one of the people who
| basically founded the "drama spectacle" in the Rust
| community.
| firstlink wrote:
| Context: Ashley Williams has publicly stated a desire to
| "kill all men", and explicitly refused to walk that back, or
| clarify it as hyperbole, or apologize for the sentiment, when
| asked to do so.
|
| Acknowledging this historical fact has (for multiple people)
| been judged a rust CoC violation so please don't go asking
| about it if you still value being part of that community, for
| some reason.
|
| And no, "kill all men" was not considered a CoC violation
| itself, because Williams is far enough up in the org chart
| that the CoC doesn't apply, as explained by the resigning
| moderation team back in 2019.
| jakear wrote:
| > I don't think any of the folks who are part of it are
| language designers
|
| Ugh. Hate this sentiment that some people _are_ language
| designers, and others simply _aren 't_. So pretentious. If
| someone is designing a language they're a language designer,
| they don't need your approval.
|
| And yes, designing the distribution, branding, community, and
| leadership around a fork of an existing language counts as
| designing a language. Just because the speaker's "team" seems
| to be lacking in those aspects doesn't mean they aren't an
| important part of language design.
|
| Regarding the "full find and replace", they haven't gone
| through to change path names because that'd cause far more
| trouble in synchronization with upstream than it's worth.
| Accordingly, they haven't changed source text that references
| those path names. Knowing which changes _are_ appropriate
| versus the ones that aren 't takes far more "language design"
| know-how than simply doing the "full find and replace" the
| speaker suggested.
| Nanana909 wrote:
| It seemed quite pretentious and dismissive to me too.
| Sorry, didn't intend to imply I agreed fully with the
| quote. But there is a deeper point which is part of our
| root comment: is it a genuine effort or a negotiation
| tactic?
| jakear wrote:
| False dichotomy. It's a step forward toward a better
| experience for all who want to write systems code with
| strict ownership semantics. It may be acting as a
| negotiation tactic now, but it's existence is only
| possible as a result of genuine effort of the folks
| involved in its creation. And if it's existence causes
| Rust team members to continue to publicly out themselves
| as pretentious try-hards who take the B out of BDFL, then
| it will become more and more genuinely important and
| useful for someone to have already put the work into
| maintaining a real fork.
| threatofrain wrote:
| The fundamental critique here is that a language effort
| needs technical credibility to attract a critical mass of
| contributors, even if the effort is solely for leverage.
| Arguing that a CEO is technically a designer because they
| make decisions on branding and leadership is an evasive
| dodge in the form of a critique.
|
| At some point in the creation of a restaurant one may wish
| to inquire on the chef leading the kitchen without getting
| into a debate as to whether the maitre d' is also a chef.
| jakear wrote:
| I don't think they do need technical credibility to
| "prove" themselves as a fork.
|
| If it were the case that all was well in Zion and nobody
| had any desire to leave Rust, then sure this would need
| to make a compelling argument on technical grounds. But
| that's miles from the truth: a large number of folks
| involved in Rust have wanted to leave it, and not on
| technical grounds. If this is the fork that can attract
| people who have technical chops but don't want to deal
| with the Rust bureaucrats, good on them. The progress
| made so far in splitting off while maintaining upstream
| compatibility seems genuine and nontrivial.
| milohax wrote:
| gatekeeping much? (Williams, I mean)
|
| Rust is on my list of things that I want to learn to use. I
| suppose that for now I can ignore the politics, but I don't
| know that I'd pick up Crab instead... what about all the
| crates, and cargo?
| cookieperson wrote:
| It'd all work the same provided crablang made additive
| changes to the syntax.
| [deleted]
| saithound wrote:
| As an interested outsider, it is indeed painfully clear at this
| point that someone is behaving like an asshole and damaging the
| project. Creating a hostile fork ticks both boxes.
| interlinked wrote:
| This fork is and will always be 'ctrl+c','ctrl+v' of the rust
| language. The only difference is that the owners of this fork
| will not go after your business if you abuse their trademark.
| The presence of this fork means that rust foundation cannot
| enforce their trademark anymore. The day they try to, it will
| become a headline and all the businesses will start using
| this fork whenever they want to talk about rust language.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| Talking about the language is something the trademark
| policy clearly says you can do. Everything that is a
| trademark violation under the policy is something that's
| really obviously a trademark violation for pretty much
| everyone, which businesses do not do very frequently.
| cookieperson wrote:
| If the people in charge don't represent you, and you can't
| get rid of them, do your own thing. I see nothing wrong with
| this. It's an OSS project, people can do what they want with
| it. I doubt it'll succeed but who cares people can do
| whatever they want.
|
| I'm honestly surprised at the amount of people on here taking
| the side of "take the abuse from leadership and don't do what
| you want with OSS".
| pie_flavor wrote:
| They're not doing their own thing. They're doing the same
| thing with a different name and have no intent to
| contribute original patches that don't change the name. It
| takes about two seconds in GitHub's UI to fork, and about
| five minutes of fiddling with sed to change it to the
| degree that they changed it.
| cookieperson wrote:
| Maybe they have a different vision for it. And sometimes
| people prefer to work under different conditions. The
| ends don't justify the means. People jump from one
| insurance company to another insurance company for
| changes in leadership every day. If these people don't
| want to work under the current leadership I'd say they
| aren't doing the same thing.
|
| OSS is a free thing. They can do what they want.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| The Rust _Foundation_ (responsible for trademark drama) and the
| Rust _Project_ (at fault for conference drama) are separate
| entities.
| [deleted]
| lelanthran wrote:
| > The Rust Foundation (responsible for trademark drama) and
| the Rust Project (at fault for conference drama) are separate
| entities.
|
| They both appear to share the same tone-deafness, though.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I can fork the repos too, but unless I present a large group of
| credible and high-level contributors (that is, I fork the team
| too). Which people are putting their weight behind this fork?
|
| The readme doesn't mention the reason for the fork, who made it
| and who governs it. Which would be the most interesting info.
| Edit: apperently there is a main site (https://crablang.org/)
| with more info. The most important piece of info is missing
| though: names.
| bartimus wrote:
| It appears this was already brewing since (before) April
| 14th:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230414111812/https://crablang..
| ..
| zamalek wrote:
| I'd argue that devops is somewhat more important than names,
| which crablang does seem to be addressing pretty quickly -
| the whole rustup workflow seems to be working, which is a big
| deal. Names will follow as names deem fit, especially when
| Rust leadership (following the latest issue, that is both the
| foundation and the project leadership) keeps making terrible
| decisions and terrible reparations.
| [deleted]
| fermigier wrote:
| I met Stallman for the first time in ~1993-1995, in Paris. He
| was talking about the threat of copyright on user interfaces
| (the infamous "thrash bin" lawsuit) and (but less so) on
| software patents, speaking in the name of the League for
| Programming Freedom[1] (LPF) that he was leading at the time.
|
| So this was a talk explicitly about programming freedom (and
| against the risk posed by excessive IP regulations), NOT about
| free software.
|
| Everybody in the room mostly agreed with Stallman, but there
| was one guy, a shareware author, who had some objections to
| what he was saying, namely that he wanted some protection for
| his software and thought that his business couldn't survive
| without them. Stallman was not pleased at the objection, and
| began shouting at him like a madman, saying that he deserved to
| die (figuratively).
|
| This happened again a few years later, still in my presence,
| this time against a representative of MuPAD, an organisation
| who had ported their software to Linux. Since I was the person
| who had invited MuPAD in the first place, I got my fair share
| of Stallman's burst of anger.
|
| Needless to say, I found the first event bizarre, to say the
| least, and Stallman lost all of my respect, as a person, after
| the second event.
|
| Besides his anger management issues, I think that he made a
| major mistake in focussing on free software as a goal in
| itself, and not on programming freedom, which could have
| rallied many more supporters.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_for_Programming_Freedom
| globular-toast wrote:
| > Besides his anger management issues, I think that he made a
| major mistake in focussing on free software as a goal in
| itself, and not on programming freedom, which could have
| rallied many more supporters.
|
| Programming freedom might have been easier, but I think free
| software is a more laudable goal. Programmers possess
| exceptional skills and it's mostly our choice to use and
| produce free software, or not. One of Stallman's essential
| tenets is that non-free software gives programmers power over
| the users. Giving programmers more freedom only serves to
| strengthen this power. Free software is supposed to give
| everybody (or nobody) this power.
| syntheweave wrote:
| Free software moves the goalposts of freedom towards
| "sufficiently clued in user can operate and maintain free
| software", not "everyone of any skillset has a viable path
| to control their program". Programming freedom is the
| harder goal. Anyone can dump source code and say "yeah it's
| GPL now."
|
| That's how it worked out that so much of the early stuff
| was, in respects small and large, "software for free,
| documentation for sale". There's no mandate for usability
| or conceptual simplicity. And we've only gotten better in
| the sense of having more developers interested in that
| stuff.
| still_grokking wrote:
| Just to get this straight: Did you just say that Stallman, the
| inventor of free software, is damaging OpenSource?
| ilc wrote:
| Learn the meaning of the two words:
|
| Open Source = You can see the source. Usually MIT / BSD + GPL
| + MPL and various others are all "Open Source"
|
| Free Software = GPL and other licenses that enforce the users
| freedom of access to source code. Free has nothing to do with
| cost.
| grayhatter wrote:
| he is... the free software movement fails without the hearts
| and minds of developers. Developers are, unfortunately, still
| humans and will refuse to follow the advice of someone they
| deem to be a twat. Even if that twat is right, if you can't
| convince someone free/open source software is better you
| lose.
|
| Stallman is well known to act like a twat, thus holding him
| up as the voice of foss will convince people that foss is
| just a bunch of douche bags. thereby damaging open source.
| hurril wrote:
| No, what is happening is a storm in a glass of water. _This_ is
| what is hurting the language and the environment.
|
| You have to protect trademarks or you lose them.
|
| Having a late change to a conference is definitely bad and sad
| but there is simply no need for that to imply a rage quit and
| all this drama. That is a non-sequiteur. Suck it up, make the
| talk on youtube (or somewhere else); I'm sure there are lots of
| people that wish to see it; I know I would.
|
| Enough drama!
| jntvjnvutnuvt wrote:
| You are okay with developers losing tens to hundreds of
| thousands of dollars in legal fees because they altered the
| Rust logo?
| cookieperson wrote:
| Nah what happened was whack and if they respect themselves or
| wanted that keynote to mean anything they should have quit.
| Saying "suck it up" is abusive relationship status...
| tialaramex wrote:
| > You have to protect trademarks or you lose them.
|
| Not really. How do you imagine this could work if it was
| true? It's a great excuse if you're looking to throw your
| weight around of course. Oh the poor Disney corporation _had_
| to sue that primary school for a bajillion dollars, or else
| they would _lose_ their trademark. Does that sort of thing
| even pass the sniff test for you?
|
| And it works out great for lawyers too. Instead of only
| getting paid when there's actual controversy that needs their
| skills, they can collect a fee for this "protection" work.
| toyg wrote:
| Sadly that's indeed how trademark law works - if you don't
| make even a token effort at enforcing your rights, they can
| become common names and effectively be lost.
|
| That doesn't mean one should rabidly go after every single
| possible infringing use, obviously, which is what the
| infamous drafted Rust policy kinda did. It's one of those
| things that are just not black and white, because laws say
| one thing ("be harsh all of the time") and actual _mores_
| around enforcement say another ( "leave people alone when
| they're clearly in good faith").
| jntvjnvutnuvt wrote:
| Name one open source programming language that has its
| trademark policies like Rust.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > Sadly that's indeed how trademark law works - if you
| don't make even a token effort at enforcing your rights,
| they can become common names and effectively be lost.
|
| Can they? Give me examples of such trademarks being lost.
|
| Do make sure to check your examples. Maybe you heard say
| that Xerox lost their trademark. Nope, Xerox(r) is still
| a registered trademark of Xerox.
|
| > That doesn't mean one should rabidly go after every
| single possible infringing use
|
| If this protection is somehow mandatory, why not? How do
| I check whether I'm "protecting" a trademark enough?
| Maybe there's a meter somewhere? Is there a scale? What
| are the units of trademark protection? If there was such
| a rule, we'd have answers to these questions. There is no
| such rule.
| fluoridation wrote:
| "Lost" meaning that one loses the right to stop others
| from using the genericized brand, not meaning that the
| trademark ceases to exist.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_generic
| ize...
| tialaramex wrote:
| The best case for the genericization argument in that
| list might be Lineoleum, but Lineoleum wasn't even a
| registered trademark. So that's literally the story: Guy
| invents Lineoleun. Product is popular, other people make
| the same product under the same name, he's not very happy
| about that so he goes to court and says hey, that's my
| trademark. No it isn't, you don't have a trademark.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| If it becomes generic it might as well be, but that's not
| the issue here. Anyway, the parent post has a google jd
| in trademark law and doesn't know what he's talking
| about, but you can't enforce your TM the same way, or if
| at all, if has become generic. The main way you lose tm
| rights is by not using the mark.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| Well, that's not exactly how it works. You don't even
| need to register a trademark to have common law rights to
| avoid source confusion. You have to _use_ the mark though
| or you lose the rights, that much is true. But the only
| way you lose the right to enforce altogether is if you
| have some kind of unregistered mark and let it expire.
| And even if everything you said was exactly right, they
| still don 't have to enforce the trademark in _every_
| case to protect their rights. As long as they keep making
| Rust, they own the rights to call a programming language
| Rust and they have the right to be identified as the
| official source and as long as they perfect their rights,
| they can use it to stop others from using it in certain
| cases, if they want. There 's not really a "waiver" issue
| except in edge cases. Things only become "common names"
| in the case (or at least it used to be) that they become
| generic terms in the language, like "Hey, go xerox this,
| get me a kleenex, and then google something." Rust will
| never be able to expand its mark quite like that because
| it is a generic term in other uses, such as iron oxide.
| They will not be able to control the production of iron
| oxide or who calls it rust. So the whole "that's just how
| this works" defense is either one given by an apologist
| or someone who is just wrong.
| lathiat wrote:
| EFF has some good writing on the subject:
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-
| not...
| hurril wrote:
| Are you asking me to defend Disney's actions because I side
| with Rust at this point?
|
| I think that it is fair that someone defends their name and
| brand and I definitely wish that you be permitted to do so,
| so that someone is unable to be too untoward to your
| business.
| torstenvl wrote:
| You keep making the claim that trademark enforcement is
| about protection against bad actors, but that is
| emphatically false here. Rust's trademark policy is
| extremely restrictive, to the point that _Rust the
| language_ can only be considered proprietary. If you
| haven 't read it, it's here: https://foundation.rust-
| lang.org/policies/logo-policy-and-me...
|
| They aren't using trademark to defend against malicious
| actors. They're using trademark to segregate and divide
| the Rust community into those who are " _officially_ part
| of the Rust community " (their words) and those who
| aren't.
| jakear wrote:
| > You have to protect trademarks or you lose them.
|
| Let them be lost, who cares? It's not even a novel name, they
| just co-opted an existing word for their little gang and now
| don't want anyone else to use it.
|
| Even Oracle, the chief lawyer-assholes of the industry, have
| basically given up on trying to own "JavaScript", and that at
| least is a uniquely derived term.
| Avamander wrote:
| > Let them be lost, who cares?
|
| Users who don't want malware/abandonware. See more:
| Mumble.com and Mumble.info
| jakear wrote:
| You're arguing one of them should have exclusive right to
| use the word "mumble" in reference to software related to
| vocal communication?
| Avamander wrote:
| Yes, one of them should have the right to use that logo
| and name for VoIP, absolutely.
|
| There are plenty of names everyone can pick that don't
| namesquat on an existing project. I find it especially
| nasty if it's a FOSS project that gets its name abused.
| wink wrote:
| I'm not sure if people who don't double check the URL are
| the same people who would memorize or compare logos on a
| site... (which is in no way a defense of what's
| happening, but I don't think the other thing would help
| either)
| hurril wrote:
| Do you think they would care if you started a company named
| Oracle?
| jakear wrote:
| Conflating product names with legal company names does
| nothing to help the discussion. The fact of the matter is
| I can have a business called
| https://learnjavascript.online/ but not one called
| https://learnrust.online/, because the Rust team has
| decided they are uniquely suited to govern all usage of
| the word "rust" as their dumb little users can't manage
| to think for themselves and determine which resources are
| worth consulting.
| hurril wrote:
| They are trademarks, though, are they not?
|
| Should I be permitted to fork Go an call it Rust?
| learnrust.com with fine resources to learn ru.. I mean
| go, no wait. Rust. Definitely rust.
|
| I am a user of Rust and I am neither dumb nor little, but
| thank you for your kind consideration of my mental
| abilities. But I think you are the one missing the point
| here: it has to do with the stability of the brand,
| language and environment; I've invested a lot of hours
| into this and will continue to do so. Without the
| protection I would not because it could be gone tomorrow,
| basically.
| hurril wrote:
| > It's the Rust foundation that considers it's users dumb
| and little, unable to think for themselves and determine
| which resources are worth using. How could you in good
| faith read what I said and come away thinking I support
| controlling the availability of resources named rust?
|
| Those are your words and I think you should own them.
|
| The trademark process is there to prevent malicious
| entities from doing that. And in an environment where
| some brand has a certain value, there will be people that
| would want to infringe on it to have a share of the
| proceeds. Why else are we even having this conversation,
| if it wasn't for the fact that people _do_ want to
| infringe on the brand?
|
| I went with the Go example to make the difference bigger.
| We can talk about the Crabs Language instead; imagine
| they take that language in another direction. (I don't
| mind that at all, doing so probably adds to the community
| of knowledge and information so I'm all for it.) But now
| let's also call them Rust.
|
| What does learnrust.com mean, then? Which Rust? A new
| users or a company looking to hire resources in this
| arena, would you call them dumb and little for not being
| able to expertly tease out the differences?
| jakear wrote:
| If you cant wait for the cool off period to expire before
| responding, consider you might be too worked up to make a
| coherent case.
|
| For one, any reasonable interpreter of the English
| language would understand that sentiment was being
| attributed to the foundation, not me.
|
| And someone wanting to use the word Rust doesn't make
| them "infringing". It's a word. It's a technology. I can
| use any other technology name to describe an offering,
| but I use Rust and it's a big deal? Hard pass.
| jakear wrote:
| It's the Rust foundation that considers it's users dumb
| and little, unable to think for themselves and determine
| which resources are worth using. How could you in good
| faith read what I said and come away thinking I support
| controlling the availability of resources named rust?
| gigatexal wrote:
| Okay this is fine but will they have the commercial backing
| that Rust has from the likes of Microsoft and Mozilla and
| others? Are the languages different? Is the fork just to fix
| the management or will the languages diverge/have they already?
| gigatexal wrote:
| from the main [site](https://crablang.org/):
|
| "The Official Home of CrabLang!
|
| A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus.
| All of the memory-safe features you love, now with 100% less
| bureaucracy!
|
| Why CrabLang?
|
| The Crab (or "CrabLang") community fork was created as a
| lighthearted yet measured response to the growing concerns
| within the community about the influence of corporations and
| the restrictive trademark policy proposed by the foundation.
| This was not a "knee-jerk" reaction, nor was it an attempt to
| spread fear or cause panic. While the document the foundation
| drafted did lead to the fork, we believe it is an overdue
| solution to a problem that already existed, and addresses
| some issues that many community members have had for some
| time.
|
| First and foremost: CrabLang is not trying to replace our
| beloved language. If you are happy with the way things are,
| we encourage you to continue using your language of choice.
| Our goal is not to fracture the community, but rather to
| provide an alternative for those who share our concerns and
| wish to have more freedom in using, creating with, and
| promoting the language without worrying about the litigation
| associated with trademark infringement.
|
| We acknowledge and appreciate the hard work and financial
| support that corporations have provided to the original
| project. We understand the importance of their contributions,
| but we also believe that it is essential to maintain a
| balance between corporate influence and the will of the
| community. The CrabLang Collective aims to provide a space
| where the community can thrive without the constraints
| imposed by corporate interests.
|
| We want to emphasize that we are not at odds with the project
| or the original language. We appreciate everything they do to
| make the language better, and our fork's main branch will
| continue to stay up to date with the upstream codebase. Our
| main goal is to ensure that the community has an alternative
| that aligns with their values and desire for unrestricted
| use.
|
| The Crab community fork is driven by our love for a language
| named after a type of fungus. We simply want to use it while
| retaining the ability to create content and promote its name,
| logo, and other assets however we please, without the
| limitations imposed by a trademark policy. By offering a
| community-driven alternative, we hope to maintain a spirit of
| collaboration, innovation, and creative freedom.
|
| With our shared passion for programming, we welcome anyone
| interested to join us in exploring the Crab community fork.
| Whether or not you fully agree with our concerns, we believe
| that diversity of thought and a commitment to inclusivity
| will only strengthen our collective efforts.
|
| Come on in! The water is warm!
|
| CrabLang 2023"
|
| Got it now.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| ffmpeg vs libav is one case where I think the hostile fork
| ended up working well.
| fluoridation wrote:
| libav was the hostile fork, not FFmpeg. Someone removed write
| permissions from key contributors (or contributor. I forget)
| and just about everyone sided with those contributors, thus
| the instigators were forced to rename their project. The
| development effort stayed on FFmpeg, even as the libav people
| tried porting back the changes. Eventually libav passed into
| irrelevance as it failed to acquire mindshare and
| distributions stopped including it.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| It's been a while since I read the story but I believe it
| did prompt some changes in ffmpeg management, that's why I
| was saying it was a hostile fork success story.
| dralley wrote:
| glibc would be a better example in that case.
| meinersbur wrote:
| libav was the fork [1], and libav is dead now [2,3] (and many
| developers returned to ffmpeg).
|
| libav was forced to rename their project because Fabrice
| Bellard, still owner of the trademark and the ffmpeg.org
| domain, did not hand it over. ffmpeg put in much effort
| retain compatibility with libav, mostly by merging all their
| changes wholesale, while libav ignored ffmpeg, including and
| most crucially, their security fixes [4].
|
| [1] http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html
|
| [2] https://www.libav.org/
|
| [3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Back-In-Debian
|
| [4] https://j00ru.vexillium.org/2014/01/ffmpeg-and-the-tale-
| of-a...
| xoac wrote:
| The only thing this fork promises is even more drama.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| It's a whitelabel copy based on policy disagreements, not unlike
| the "Iceweasel" (now Debian Firefox-ESR)[0] fork of Firefox. Just
| dawned on me after I wrote the first sentence that both actions
| targeted Mozilla offspring.
|
| [0] https://wiki.parabola.nu/IceWeasel_History
| fooker wrote:
| This means something about Mozilla policies/politics is going
| wrong.
| ragnese wrote:
| I thought Mozilla barely has anything to do with Rust
| anymore. I assume they're part of the foundation or
| something, but are they actually setting/imposing any
| policies for Rust anymore?
| arp242 wrote:
| That's correct; Rust is entirely spun off from Mozilla. I
| don't think any of the current Rust Foundation people ever
| worked for Mozilla.
| insanitybit wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with Firefox policy that led to
| IceWeasel. Mozilla owns the Firefox Trademark. Someone wanted
| to avoid that so they created IceWeasel.
|
| This is working as intended. There's no controversy, there's
| no one saying "wow I can't believe Mozilla would _own the
| Firefox trademark_ ! ", it's just... how someone wanted to
| play it.
|
| It's incredibly unlikely that this was necessary or actually
| achieved anything _meaningful_ other than "Mozilla's
| trademark policy does not apply to this"... but that's a
| whole other thing.
|
| edit: Actually, what it achieves is that Debian can
| distribute a modified Firefox (because I believe they may
| modify source code for it) without representing it as Mozilla
| Firefox, which is _great_. Again, _working as intended_ - now
| no one is confused, you know that the Firefox you are getting
| is not the one straight from Mozilla.
| worksonmine wrote:
| The trademark conflicted with the policies of the Debian
| repositories. Debian is very picky about what goes in the
| standard repositories.
| insanitybit wrote:
| And that's fine. They removed the trademarked icon and
| name. This is all as intended.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > This means something about Mozilla policies/politics is
| going wrong.
|
| Again.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Not really. At the scale of Rust and Firefox, some level of
| disagreement within and without the relevant political
| structure(s) is unavoidable.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Several paragraphs of backstory, and not a single word describing
| the thing itself.
|
| I won't care _why_ I 'm reading about this until I can learn
| _what_ I 'm reading about!
| detrites wrote:
| As someone also unfamiliar, this exchange seemed to summarise
| it, unless someone else can offer correction or additional
| context:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36128144
| still_grokking wrote:
| This will go nowhere. That's sure.
|
| It has exactly zero technical advantages over the original. It
| has not even the plan to add any improvements over the
| original... The plan is just to merge upstream.
|
| It has no funding. (And a project of this sized needs a lot of
| funding, just to get the day to day maintenance going.)
|
| This whole thing is completely pointless. I'm wondering why it
| gets so much attention.
| naasking wrote:
| > It has exactly zero technical advantages over the original.
| It has not even the plan to add any improvements over the
| original... The plan is just to merge upstream.
|
| Technical advantage is not the goal. Here is the actual reason
| they forked: https://crablang.org/ The Crab
| (or "CrabLang") community fork was created as a lighthearted
| yet measured response to the growing concerns within the
| community about the influence of corporations and the
| restrictive trademark policy proposed by the foundation
| nurettin wrote:
| Not intended to fracture, but obviously will, because people
| prefer language support to unmaintained crates.
| edem wrote:
| Do you remember io.js?
| firstlink wrote:
| I wish the crablang people would make it a lot more clear how to
| contribute to crablang itself. Were I to make any future bugfixes
| etc. I'd prefer to submit them to crablang rather than deal with
| the other folks. As it's open source folks would be free to
| "upstream" should they so desire.
|
| Unfortunately you can't have something be both a long-term fork
| and also accept contributions, so the crablang people need to
| decide and then publicize that decision.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| For those who are just confused about the whole situation (like I
| was), there's an video explaining the issue that lead the fork
| happening; https://youtu.be/gutR_LNoZw0
| timcavel wrote:
| [dead]
| xoac wrote:
| Is anyone with significant contributions to the language behind
| this? Otherwise who cares? Another twitch/discord stunt to
| generate views and clout.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > A community fork of a language named after a plant fungus.
|
| Huh, so that's what former manufacturing regions are named after.
| Here I was thinking that it referred to particular oxidized
| metals.
|
| \s
| pengaru wrote:
| According to github rust has been forked 10,819 times...
|
| https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/forks
| dijit wrote:
| Not a useful metric as making a Pull Request requires making a
| private fork.
| cornfutes wrote:
| Say what you will about BDFL development, but if the alternatives
| was so great, Unix and Go wouldn't have remained the de facto
| implementations.
| shmerl wrote:
| And the point of that is?
|
| Huge suspect is that the readme doesn't explain the reason for
| the fork.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Honestly this bomb was waiting to burst for a long time now. Rust
| has aligned politically instead of just being a cool language.
| Bringing politics into something unrelated which brings people
| together is always a recipe for disaster.
| incrudible wrote:
| But... the _people who made it_ brought the politics. They own
| it. Rust is also not a cool language. You can not be cool and
| fuss about soundness and memory safety at the same time. It is
| mutually exclusive.
| smolder wrote:
| > You can not be cool and fuss about soundness and memory
| safety at the same time.
|
| Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm struggling to decide whether this comment is a troll
| comment or not. But I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
|
| > But... the people who made it brought the politics. They
| own it.
|
| They don't. At the very least not fully. The compiler itself
| is MIT/Apache licensed. This gives up a lot of control and I
| think many people, including me, would say that means they
| don't own it anymore.
|
| > Rust is also not a cool language. You can not be cool and
| fuss about soundness and memory safety at the same time. It
| is mutually exclusifve.
|
| Whether the people who implement Rust and/or write Rust are
| cool has nothing to do whether the language itself is cool. I
| also fail to grasp why caring about memory safety and
| soundness and being cool is considered mutually exclusive.
| Why would it be?
| deafpolygon wrote:
| That's funny. Now do Go!
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| Craab people craaab people. Walk like crab, talk like people.
| Craaab people.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I disagree with the general sentiment in this thread that this is
| a useless immature move. Sure, Crab will almost certainly not
| replace Rust, but that is not the goal.
|
| The ultimate objective is to influence Rust stakeholders'
| decisions.
|
| This is similar to a strike where ultimately your goal is not to
| destroy the company or to quit and leave, but to achieve better
| conditions. In both cases it sometimes works and sometimes not
| and in both cases, just because it might not work does not make
| it an immature move.
| rozab wrote:
| That's an interesting viewpoint, it parallels the outsized
| influence small parties exert in FPTP electoral systems (at
| least in functioning ones)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| CrabLang doesn't want to influence Rust stakeholders'
| decisions. They 100% support all the decisions the Rust Project
| made.
|
| CrabLang was created to get people to out themselves who hate
| Rust and want to see it fail.
|
| Anyways...
|
| > The ultimate objective is to influence Rust stakeholders'
| decisions.
|
| That's not what this fork says is the objective.
|
| https://crablang.org/
|
| > We simply want to use [Rust] while retaining the ability to
| create content and promote its name, logo, and other assets
| however we please, without the limitations imposed by a
| trademark policy.
|
| The Trademark Policy
|
| https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/logo-policy-and-me...
|
| > The most basic rule is that the Rust trademarks cannot be
| used in ways that appear (to a casual observer) official,
| affiliated, or endorsed by the Rust project or Rust Foundation,
| unless you have written permission from the Rust Foundation.
|
| So, from what I gather, CrabLang opposes this.
|
| In which case, CrabLang wanted to use the Rust trademarks to
| deceive people into thinking it's endorsed by the project and
| foundation.
|
| Which is an odd stance to take, because that's them saying they
| want people to use CrabLang to deceive people into thinking
| CrabLang endorses things it does not. ;)
| wccrawford wrote:
| >In which case, CrabLang wanted to use the Rust trademarks to
| deceive people into thinking it's endorsed by the project and
| foundation.
|
| Instead, I see their statement as a visceral reaction to some
| legal threat they received that they don't think was valid.
| They probably weren't trying to deceive anyone, they just
| wanted to name their project "Rust Widget" or something and
| don't like that they are open to legal action from that
| because someone might think that's an official Rust project,
| when it's not... Even if most people would know it's not.
|
| I'm not privy to _any_ information in this debate, I just don
| 't support your interpretation of their words. I think mine
| is a more charitable interpretation until further evidence of
| their actual meaning comes to light.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > they just wanted to name their project "Rust Widget"
|
| That's already explicitly covered by their trademark
| policy.
|
| > Using the Rust trademarks in the names of non-commercial
| products like RustPostgres or Rustymine, or in the name of
| code repositories in e.g. GitHub, is allowed when referring
| to use with or suitability for the Rust programming
| language. Such uses may also include the Rust logo, even in
| modified form. For commercial products (including
| crowdfunded or sponsored ones), please check in with us to
| ensure your use does not appear official.
|
| > They probably weren't trying to deceive anyone
|
| That's the intent of the policy they oppose, so... /shrug
| orbital223 wrote:
| > That's the intent of the policy they oppose, so...
| /shrug
|
| There is a world of difference between "intent" and
| reality.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I would like to remind everyone of the time where NodeJS was
| forked into a more bleeding edge version of Node, and
| eventually down the line, all the changes were pulled into
| NodeJS and things were consolidated.
|
| Edit: It was iojs
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8694953
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8669557
| ChickeNES wrote:
| Or much longer ago, egcs being forked from gcc and later
| being subsumed back into the original project by the FSF
| jhbadger wrote:
| Or XEmacs forking off from Emacs in 1993. Although that
| didn't so much get subsumed but basically died a decade or
| so ago when most of the features XEmacs provided had been
| added to normal Emacs.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Sure, Crab will almost certainly not replace Rust, but that
| is not the goal.
|
| I see it as: there's a finite amount of people who choose to
| dedicate their unpaid free time contributing to making Rust
| better (working on fixing bugs, new features, etc.)
|
| This seems like fragmentation which basically will slow down
| progress. Now, obviously the people who choose to dedicate
| their free time to open source software are entitled to do
| whatever they want with it. I don't know the details of what
| part of what leadership is doing what that equates to "being a
| meanie" and I don't know who is "being dramatic" and who isn't.
|
| All I know is, I'm grateful for their contributions and wish
| everybody could get along. This is kind of "not a good thing"
| for progress when you look at it from a delivery perspective.
| slashdev wrote:
| On the other hand it could become a place to test ideas and
| port the winners over to rust. It's not necessarily negative.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Sorta like EGCS was for GCC?
| cies wrote:
| Only here the whole language was also forked.
|
| So more like if C++ PLUS g++ where forked. Then C++
| already had many compiler implementations before I was
| even born, and Rust has one serious one (and several
| other with explicitly different goals).
| dunham wrote:
| I think this essentially happened with XEmacs. It's been a
| while (since the 90's), but I recall that they had a
| different architecture and more advanced font support. I
| believe the latter was folded back into Emacs eventually.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| This assumes it doesn't slow down velocity/introduce time
| wasted with bureaucracy/trying to keep 2 separate codebases
| in sync/timelines/initiatives, etc.
| mikeryan wrote:
| io.js (node.js fork) seems like a parallel. It split off to
| get away from Joyents advisory board that was slowing down
| development and the trademark issues around Node. It was
| more performant in the short term with faster development
| cycles. Once the issues with Joyent were worked out it was
| merged back into mainline node.
|
| Different political issues here so whether it gets ported
| back into Rust or becomes what Rust was (or just fades
| away) is still TBD but who knows?
| tedivm wrote:
| You're making a huge assumption with the "unpaid free time"
| part of this. A lot of Rust development is driven by
| corporations who are directly paying engineers to work on it,
| and the rust foundation has a lot of money coming in via
| donations (literally millions).
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > A lot of Rust development is driven by corporations who
| are directly paying engineers to work on it, and the rust
| foundation has a lot of money coming in via donations
| (literally millions).
|
| Then why are people set up about the
| trademark/copyright/license issue?
| dralley wrote:
| >Then why are people set up about the
| trademark/copyright/license issue?
|
| For the same reason people go ballistic over myriad other
| trivial things (e.g. Twitter), they find drama
| entertaining and outrage is effortless and consequence
| free (for them).
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| it's odd how these types of people seem to be drawn to
| being open source contributors
|
| it's like their personality draws them to it? it seems
| more prominent in this community
| bluGill wrote:
| Some of the rust political decisions are concerning though.
| I can see the companies giving that money switching to
| someone else to avoid that politics. Time will tell, first
| the replacement needs to stick around for a while and prove
| to be a viable fork, which is hard without the donations.
| cies wrote:
| When did a language fork work without new goals?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Even if we agree that there is a fixed finite amount of
| people, mind that not everybody will work with everybody wit
| h the same process.
|
| Having only a single organisation might prevent some people
| from contributing, who in a different environment might
| submit ideas and do some work.
|
| The results then may influence the other project as well.
|
| Human interaction is complicated ...
| jb3689 wrote:
| Not to downplay any of your points, but as a counterpoint,
| I'm not sure this was true for Vim/Neovim. Perhaps I'm only
| looking at short-term gains though and not long-term
| fragmentation
| lr1970 wrote:
| > Not to downplay any of your points, but as a
| counterpoint, I'm not sure this was true for Vim/Neovim.
|
| On the contrary. Emergence on neovim had a positive impact
| on vim speed of development, and Bram's attitude to new
| features (vim terminal, async, etc) softened a lot. He has
| also become more open to contributions from others. Even
| though vim-9 and neovim are on divergent paths they are
| both better because of the competition.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I believe the various BSDs would be another example. There
| have always been folks who argue that fragmentation/lack of
| developers/etc would kill them. Not yet, fortunately.
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's the threat of people abandoning the current leadership. It
| has to be credible to make a change.
| yawpitch wrote:
| Too bad it isn't credible.
| cookieperson wrote:
| Maybe it'd be a good idea to just clean house and elect new
| people. Possibly even people who resigned exclusively and
| some people with emotional maturity.
| lloeki wrote:
| cue node.js - io.js and gcc - egcs
| usrusr wrote:
| I was about to mention EGCS, then looked it up to refresh my
| memory: wow, that split didn't even last two years, crazy how
| the passage of time changes as you become less young.
| _nalply wrote:
| I started reading up the history of gcc. It's really
| fascinating. Stallman made the first release 1987. This means
| gcc is 36 years old if you count the first release as birth.
|
| https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History
|
| I want to find out more about egcs. TIL that there was a fork
| of gcc.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Or the short lived "@ lang", a fork of typescript or
| javascript (I believe) that added annotations because the
| Angular developers really wanted annotations. I can't even
| find any information about it anymore, maybe my google skills
| are failing.
| ralmidani wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtScript
| [deleted]
| timkofu wrote:
| It's evidence of division and strife. They have allowed the
| environment to get toxic. Groups that were planning on adopting
| Rust will now think twice, as it's future now looks uncertain.
| All organizations that produce something valuable face this
| test, it's the ones that don't fracture that succeed.
| gabereiser wrote:
| This. When tech leaders look at Rust as a solution for legacy
| products and services - then see Crab grab - it makes them
| think the ecosystem isn't mature enough for their 25+yr old
| platform.
| [deleted]
| jurimasa wrote:
| They would be correct. It is not mature.
| kaycey2022 wrote:
| It was inevitable given the pushy nature of their
| evangelists. People who fall out of a cult are it's fiercest
| enemies.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| If I were in Rust leadership, I would have a very hard time not
| seeing this as a personal failing and resigning. I'm not privy
| to any insider information, but this feels like a situation
| where I'd leave with a lot more respect for involved people if
| they said "I love Rust, and I need to step down for the sake of
| trust and the community.". But, much as some would like to
| imagine technical projects as being above it, PPP gets in the
| way (personalities, pride, politics).
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| Well. If you were in the Rust leadership, with such state of
| mind as to say "I love Rust, and I need to step down for the
| sake of trust and the community." I don't think you'd have
| hired a lawyer to defend the trademark ...
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Or voting third-party with the hope that it makes the margin of
| victory for the "serious" candidate fall within the number of
| third-party voters.
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