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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

This is a volunteer-driven open source community that operates in the relative open, and occasionally you will see how the sausage is made, or some dirty laundry. It's getting attention because that community is producing something popular with a lot of stakeholders, who are not active in the organization but worried about its health and stability.

It's also not completely banal. Designing durable non-profits, governance structures, decision-making processes, policies, etc. is quite complex. You can to some extend evaluate your success by how much public drama you get to avoid. :-) That makes it a case study of interest.

(I've helped run one of the major FOSS orgs for about a decade or so.)

View on HN

It bears keeping in mind that plenty of other organizations have the same drama, but more hidden from public view. Rust is in the awkward spot of being primarily community driven unlike Go or Java, and also having that community operate mostly in public channels unlike C++. That is ultimately for the best, but it exposes a lot more "mess" to the public.

C++ language evolution is developed mostly in public. We don't get to see WG21 meetings, but we see most of the emails (https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/), almost all of the TS proposal papers (everything except for very early drafts), and notable meetings still have multiple recaps from various participants in addition the the Meeting Minutes publicly outlining what these discussions are about, and we see (afaik) all of the formal votes that the committee members take (although the votes are anonymized). Plus a considerable amount of the conversation happens on GitHub, and many paper authors ask for feedback on Reddit and chat clients.

Also, the standards work is only a portion of C++ language evolution. Clang RFCs are public and anyone can provide feedback, the GCC mailing list is public, and both of their issue trackers (which include feature requests) are public.

We're not talking about mishandling sponsorship funds or unilateral decisions made on technical architecture, we're talking about time slots at a technical conference.

There's nothing here but some beef between PhD and a yet-unknown member of rust leadership. This is high school stuff, the wider community should not elevate this or read these tea leaves.

That's a mischaracterization. The issue is that the yet-unknown member of rust leadership violated the norms, and neither of the two teams involved were able to do anything about it. The problem is not the beef but the way it was handled by the system as a whole.

Norms about scheduling a tech conference.

Who cares

That rust leadership person is a dickhead. Great. End of story. Sometimes in life people are dicks, they eat your sandwich from the employee fridge even though it was clearly labeled as yours. That makes that individual a jerk, not the wider organization an Evil Empire.

You keep asking:

> Who cares

A: Obviously enough people to make this a rather lively HN discussion. And to make it somewhat prominent news in the tech sphere in general. So, quite a lot of people.

Which makes one wonder why exactly you are repeatedly trying to minimise it with this dismissive “who cares”? One can't help but wonder if it is because you have some personal stake here that you don't want people scrutinizing too thoroughly.

It's not "some beef between ThePhD and a yet-unknown member of Rust leadership", that makes it sound like it goes both way. It's a yet-unknown member of Rust leadership who apparently has a problem with ThePhD, but doesn't want to explain what that problem is, doesn't even want to make their identity known to ThePhD, and silently circumvents the normal decision-making process of the Rust Project to block ThePhD's work from making progress.

That... is a problem.

Maybe PhD flipped them off in an intersection, who cares!

It doesn't matter, it's completely irrelevant to the wider technical community. We'll never know and we shouldn't want to. This shouldn't have escalated past some emails about "what gives", but because some of the people involved have two speed grievance meters (none and crisis) we get to watch this soap opera play out.

Rust leadership person is probably a dickhead, great, lots of people are dickheads. I hope their friends say mean things about them when they leave the table at group lunches.

Way to miss the point. The point isn't the keynote / non-keynote itself, it's how it went from one to the other, and what that says about the state of the Rust project.

> Rust leadership person is probably a dickhead, great, lots of people are dickheads.

The point is, Rust isn't supposed to have a “leadership person”; it's supposed to be run by a group of people. The fact that some (as you so correctly conclude) dickhead is able to circumvent that, and in effect usurp de facto leadership (at least on this issue), shows that Rust’s leadership process isn't working as it is supposed to.

It's hard to conceive of how extremely narrow a view one must take on this “soap opera”, in order not to see that what it shows is actually a pretty big deal. Squinting really hard, aren't ya?

The problem is now it seems like all I hear about on HN in terms of Rust is drama. It’s unfortunate as I really like the language.

In a way it's just a sign of its success. There isn't a lot of news about most programming languages because no one cares.

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