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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
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).
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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. ;)
>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.
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
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.
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).
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”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I have always had the feeling that Mozilla went through a transformation when they suddenly had a very strong power backing them. I am specifically talking about AOL and their very litigious legal force. Although the particular arrangement is not in place anymore Mozilla isn't what it used to be before it either. (The story of them going after the Firebird database people is all but forgotten today)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Does anyone honestly think this is even possible?
Is “bureaucracy” a euphemism for Diversity, Equity And Inclusion busybodies, in this case?
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.
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.
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 ...
Edit: It was iojs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8694953
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8669557
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History
I want to find out more about egcs. TIL that there was a fork of gcc.
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. ;)
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.
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
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
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).
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.
[0] https://wiki.parabola.nu/IceWeasel_History
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.
Again.
More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583089
People like to hide motives
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
There’s a fresh new level of hell I hope I don’t get sent to for my sins when my time is up.
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)
A thing does not need to be enterprise level to be useful or even very useful.
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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.
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.
Who told you that? Weird choice of words.
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.
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...
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."
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.
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