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Comment by babyblueblanket | Hacker News Reader

It might be that they cannot censure the offending member in any capacity, due to their core team member status. In that case, resignation is the only thing they have to effectively rebuke behavior.

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As pointed out on r/rust, the approved Governance RFC states quite unambiguously that the Core Team is accountable to the community wrt. their behavior:

> Subteam, and especially core team members are also held to a high standard of behavior. Part of the reason to separate the moderation subteam is to ensure that CoC violations by Rust's leadership be addressed through the same independent body of moderators.

https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/1068-rust-governance.html

Public shaming by respected community members is probably somewhat effective. However, they chose not to do that here. Without knowing more, I have to trust their judgment. But I recognize that it’s unsatisfying.

Is there any possibility they are under formal legal contract ie. NDA? Don't know how formal the Rust organization is setup/whether that would be a part in the process of joining the moderation team.

A moderation team under NDA might as well not exist. Moderators should always be free to speak their minds.

Is HR on the employees side? No. Same thing here, the moderation team didn't realize that their job was to protect the core team from the rest, holding the core team accountable wasn't a part of their job even if it was warranted.

An NDA for an open-source project? I sincerely hope no one tried that, but if they did, that's a radical idea and the effects must be studied (never let someone doing something weird go to waste, science can learn from it!)

I don't know what changes when formal structures like a foundation start getting involved.

This has a much worse effect though. Instead of damaging a single member they are now damaging the whole core team by leaving it unspecific, and they are damaging Rust as well.

Whether it’s better or worse is unknowable.

Yes, because if you accuse a group when you should be accusing an individual you are doing all of the people in the group a disservice. Then you should just say nothing. 'wie A zegt moet ook B zeggen'. If there are major upsides to this approach then I'm not aware of them, do tell.

TAN:

> 'wie A zegt moet ook B zeggen'.

Someone else mentioned "the Russian proverb, 'If you've said A, say B'"... In Swedish it's "Har man sagt A får man säga B". Seems rather international.

It might be that the details would also damage the core team and The Rust community much worse with a flood of people leaving or people being targeted for harassment/abuse.

I'll give that the benefit of the doubt, but if that is the case then Rust is dead because if the core team can't be trusted to handle something like this then probably Rust as an experiment has failed, you won't get further corporates taking a gamble on Rust if this sort of cloud is hanging over the core team.

Well I think Amazon has a vested interest in the language at this point. Does the core team even matter that much now? If the core team falls apart could Amazon not simply pick up the reins? It doesn't seem to have hurt C# or Swift to be driven by a company.

There have been many points of friction in the history of C# and Swift caused by company-driven goals influencing the development of the language ecosystem in ways that some of their communities disagreed with. Leaving that aside, those languages were purpose-built by those companies for their use. Amazon didn’t create Rust, and it’s hard to imagine a hostile takeover would be received well.

Friction points are unavoidable. The point is they survived and have flourished under the direction of these companies who benefit from their continued existence.

I agree a hostile takeover would not be good for anyone but if the existing management structure turns out to be a roadblock maybe stewardship from a big tech company wouldn't be so bad.

I suspect that doing it this way puts pressure on the core team members who don't subscribe to the behaviors moderate the people on the core team who are problems. But one can never know.

Yes, that's how I read it too. At a guess, if the threat to resign didn't change anything the resignation also won't change anything and strongly suggesting the core team can not be trusted not to lie is a very harsh move that has the power to destabilize the whole Rust experiment. Massively dumb move this.

I think the only thing damaged is the concept to follow a COC to the letter. This was expected, people complained about it thoroughly and I think communities work better with a flexible approach as I don't think any personal conflicts have caused problems anywhere to a relevant degree. There are neither judges nor attorneys here.

I don't understand, why would you trust the judgement of volunteer moderators instead of core technical people?

Well obviously you wouldn't, on technical stuff, -- but that's not what this is about, now is it?

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