Rust has been forked to the Crab Language
github.com
github.com
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neither is Rust, so we're back to this being pretty stupid.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
There is a world of difference between "intent" and reality.
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.
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.
I can't think of any language, but the idea that a fork can work has a long successful history. (And a large history of failure)
Objective C forked C and gcc. (eventually folded back)
Mozilla isn't open source first fundation(?), forking of their stuff is urgent.
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).
I'm not thrilled with the trademark changes myself but forking because they posted a draft and asked for comment is absolutely dumb as heck and not productive. It just adds to the drama.
it’s like their personality draws them to it? it seems more prominent in this community
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).
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?
I think a lot of Rust's governance and leadership has left some poor impressions in a lot of ways and the Trademark licensing is just the step too far for a lot of people. I don't think the goal is to necessarily destroy rust, but definitely change the direction somewhat dramatically.
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 ...
And you are saying that multitude of C compilers make C less mature ?? You are literally saying "tech leaders" use some kind of reverse logic :) Maybe Mozilla isn't Oracle but "trademarking" lang name is just Java-like move.
It's more likely to be removed if the effort failed (which it seems to be) than it was to be added in the first place.
Edit: It was iojs
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.
--
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.
Again.
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.
More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35583089
People like to hide motives
However, this is very strongly refuted. See [edit: warning: abrasively worded post by withoutboats] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26410487
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.
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.
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.
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.
Besides, a number of forks have had a positive effect on the original project: Emacs, GCC, GNU libc, Vim, probably more.
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.
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.
Competition if anything breeds more innovation.
I wish someone came up, e.g., with an Elm fork.
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.
...You know?
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."
- It was a trap
- Mao didn't expect serious criticism, was surprised, and lashed out
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...
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.
But they quite dislike this fork, don’t they?
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.
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...
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.
A thing does not need to be enterprise level to be useful or even very useful.
Heard it all a thousand times already.
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)
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).
It is not a specification that standardizes rust or prescribes any behavior to the compiler. It's a specification that describes certain aspects of the behavior of the existing rust compiler. It's neither comprehensive nor is intended to be. It follows the changes in the compiler. If there's a mismatch between compiler behavior or the spec, the spec is considered faulty. It is also not sufficient to write a new compiler based on the spec.
As such, Ferrocene is not an effort to standardize rust. We consider the Ferrocene project a certified downstream of the rust project. Any push to standardize rust would need to come from the rust project itself. We have not intention to create any such standard.
That said, there is some interest in building a specification for the rust language in the project itself - here's the relevant RFC https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3355
(1) I am one of the managing directors of Ferrous
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.
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!)
There’s a fresh new level of hell I hope I don’t get sent to for my sins when my time is up.
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.
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.
That may be good. It a narcissistic trait and they are leaving the project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this was behind the rather unsuccessful attempts to cancel him a few years ago, which cast a shadow over his reputation.
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.
Sometimes appeals to moderation are valid, but I think sometimes it is entirely the wrong thing to do.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The very existence of the FSF's offerings is necessary to understand what other positions compromise to obtain other benefits.
Can a person be ideologically pure and not be an asshole? Or do the two go together (as is alleged with Stallman)?
[0] https://redanianintelligence.com/2021/12/09/henry-cavill-add...
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.
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).
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...?
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.
> 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.
No credible allegation have brought forward against Stallman's behavior regarding women. It's all hearsay and we should avoid hearsay and rumors.
Also aside from that he was an enormous asshole to people, which damaged his own goals, and is just wrong.
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.
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.
You don't need to persuade everyone, sometimes it's just enough to witness your truth. Ask christians.
Stallman had exactly zero influence on that shift.
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.
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.
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.
Stallman will be Stallman in all his weird and egocentric ways.
This is a case of the ship choosing to go down with the captain.
The same way someone distributing a program that makes use of an LGPL library is only obligated to release the changes they made to the LGPL library, not the entire program. You are allowed to build your proprietary GUI on top of the LAGPL base and offer it as a service over the internet but you are not allowed to hold any changes to the base for yourself.
The line of what is considered a derivative and the line of what is considered distribution are orthogonal and one of the 4 quadrants is currently missing.
The goal is to effectively prevent the introduction of incompatibilities through Embrace-Extend-Extinguish. Weak copyleft like the LGPL has been effective at preventing EEE without discouraging all corporate use. Strong copyleft is actively avoided in corporate environments but weak copyleft is not. The goal would be to achieve the same but in a cloud environment.
The space it would be useful in is preventing cloud providers from introducing incompatibilities between their offering and the original FOSS project yet allowing them to build services on top (GUI's, billing, etc.) which allow them to differentiate.
How this gets encoded in legalese is their job as stewards of the GPL license suite, holders of the copyright over the text of the licenses and social gatekeepers of license proliferation.
"Another significant change in this release is that it was pointed out that there were error messages in Linux suggesting users to update x86 CPU microcode. Since such microcode is non-Free Software, such messages don't belong in GNU Linux-libre. We now have patterns to detect and clean up this sort of message. A number of them were introduced recently, relying on microcode changes to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown problems, but there might be others that go farther back. I haven't yet made my mind on whether to go back, check and possibly respin such earlier releases."
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2018-04/msg00002...
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...
Stallman is not a software freedom purist nor is he a copyleft purist. He is a GPL purist. Notice how when others created copyleft licenses that are incompatible with the GPL there was much gnashing of teeth. The discussion is never about whether the GPL is compatible with some other copyleft license, it's always about whether any other copyleft license is compatible with the GPL.
2. The popularity of FOSS licences to some degree depends on endorsement by FOSS organisations like FSF and OSI. Custom licences are actively avoided and criticised. The GPL3 does nothing to protect against SaaS because that is not a threat that was envisioned by Stallman at the time. He was more concerned (and rightfully concerned) about Tivo-isation. Tivo-isation is a Right to Repair issue and it is really painful today. But Tivo-isation and SaaS are just different sides of the same coin called erosion of ownership. By failing to more strongly endorse the AGPL and by failing to provide a LAGPL, Stallman and the FSF (Stallman's fanclub) neglected the threat of SaaS. The LAGPL would have probably had more impact than just complaining about SaaS at conferences. Eventually some projects like MongoDB switched to non-FOSS licenses and others like CockroachDB switched to the BSL which eventually reverts to a FOSS licence after a predefined amount of time. For all of these projects the AGPL would have resulted in almost no adoption, but the LAGPL might have been a viable option. The FSF failed at their main job of license stewardship by failing to provide the licences society needed while being one of the two gatekeepers of licence proliferation.
Note, by SaaS I am currently referring to PROVIDER HOSTED SaaS which implies a service provider doing the computing on behalf of the user. SaaS can also be just a licensing model like it is for Photoshop.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The default today is not the Unix model, it is the Windows model and increasingly the SaaS model. You have none of the 4 freedoms by default.
GP argued that by law by default you should have at least freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that it should not be legal to withhold freedom 0 and 1. GP argued that freedom 0 and 1 should by default actually be facilitated by providing source code. They are arguing for changing the status quo and that doing so gradually is more feasible than all at once.
(Source code is not actually necessary for freedom 1 but it makes it orders of magnitude easier.)
You are arguing that the law is fine because we can just make our own sandbox (GPL software) where we have all 4 freedoms and that is enough. You are arguing that the status quo is fine because you can ignore it while you are in the sandbox.
Turns out the world is a lot bigger than that sandbox.
Your approach towards a world of free software might be to just grow the sandbox until everything else doesn't matter but the GNU GPL family continues to decline in popularity. For this approach you need popularity and for popularity you need effective advocacy and the FSF is not effective.
This has been argued over and over and over, and it has made no difference whatsoever. All the limited-rights licenses that have been tried from time to time (MPL et al) have simply fallen by the wayside: because, in reality, nobody is actually interested in this "right to repair" - it was around in the Unix days and it was discarded, because it did not effectively serve users nor businesses.
What have had an impact are effectively two licenses: the MIT/BSD ("do what you want") and GPL ("do what you want but your changes should be public"). By adopting and leveraging those two licenses, the world was slowly steered where we are now - which is a lot better than where we were in the '90s but also where we were in the '70s. We got here by being radical in a punk sense: creating a world of software developed in the open, and fuck what was there before. It's not by bowing to established interests that we ended up with Microsoft developing in the open, it's by bombing their commercial spaces with open software. The minute you stop doing that, they will happily retreat behind the firewall.
> Turns out the world is a lot bigger than that sandbox.
The sandbox is the world at this point, closed software is retreating every day to smaller and smaller niches. You use browsers developed in the open, on websites built with opensource software. Even on mobile, the foundational frameworks are open - the most popular mobile OS is opensource. Obviously it's not a perfect state of things, but it's a world apart from the bad old '90s, and we did get here by keeping the Overton window firmly rooted at one end, thanks in large part to the FSF. It doesn't really matter how much software is GPL, what matters is that other licenses are defined in relation to the GPL.
The only open source browser with significant usage is Firefox and it is in the single digits. Chromium might be open source but it is not what people use, it's in the other category in statistics. People use Chrome and Edge and Safari and Opera and Vivaldi and none of them are open source. The number of people using AOSP is also vanishingly small. Most Android users use one of the proprietary variants of Android. The year of the Linux desktop never came. The most popular Linux variant after the proprietary Android is the proprietary ChromeOS. And, worst of all, many services that before didn't even involve a computer (ordering food, calling a ride, banking, etc.), now are done through closed source software. It is getting harder and harder to live without proprietary software.
So absolutely not, the sandbox is not the world, the sandbox is getting smaller and smaller in comparison to the world.
The argument was not to no longer hold the Overton window pinned. The argument was to advocate for consumer rights and protections in LAW. Free software advocates are vary much interested in right to repair because right to repair also counters tivo-isation. And the world is much more tivo-ized than it ever was. That the world became so tivo-ized is also a sign of how ineffective the FSF has been at countering a threat they were among the first to draw attention to. You can have all the free software in the world and it is of no use if you can not run it on any hardware.
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.
There are still some important GNU projects though, GCC, GNU libc, and Grub being the most notable.
I don't know the details but, I mean, GNOME/GTK people themselves have been very good at alienating folks of all sorts...
Except he's pissed off most of those people too.
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.
Guess who's the common denominator here? Yup. JeanHeyd. Such a small world.
[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235124.html
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.
There was also the whole egcs thing.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230414111812/https://crablang....
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!
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.
Users who don't want malware/abandonware. See more: Mumble.com and Mumble.info
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.
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.
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?
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.
It seems to me that it would be educational for you to read a little about how trademarks work. The stuff that you direct at me has thorough explanations; these are not my opinions. To be honest: I'm not even 100% sure I even want the current trademark system, but I do understand the arguments for it.
And it seems to me you could take a look at how literally any other language manages their name. Rust is alone in this drama-fest, as they tend to be.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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® 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
You might want to check your blood pressure.
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.
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".
OSS is a free thing. They can do what they want.
I didn't know the authors had no intention of not doing anything with the repo. In which case it's just someone trolling. Which is also not a big deal.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-Back-In-Debian
[4] https://j00ru.vexillium.org/2014/01/ffmpeg-and-the-tale-of-a...
They both appear to share the same tone-deafness, though.
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.
It made sense then and it makes sense now.
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.
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_Asshole_Rule
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.
[*] yes, it can be more complicated than this. you get my meaning.
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
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.
[1]: https://github.com/dotnet-foundation/Home/discussions/40
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.
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.
You mean it didn't work well for Oracle when everybody moved to a fork?
This drama has already damaged Rust and it needs to be addressed ASAP
This doesn't create drama surrounding the Rust Foundation, this is drama directly caused by the Rust Foundation.
Was it the case when nodejs was forked?
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2854642/nodejs-gains-a-new...
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.
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 ?
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.
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 foundationDoes this fork have a significant amount of support? By whom? Or why is this news worthy?
Also, people already do work in Rust. It's in the Linux kernel right now.
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
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?
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.
I really hope this project doesn't take a bad turn, and succeeds.
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.
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.
I'm absolutely convinced that software names are a conspiracy for to bring users to the threshold that will make them weep.
Unable to look up "C++ language". The following search tokens are too short: CThe other two…well, either viewpoint would have excellent arguments pro/con.
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.
MySQL vs MariaDB?
Glimpse vs GIMP (that one didn't go so well)
Debian vs Devuan
FFmpeg vs libav
Audacity vs whatever its called
All the best for Crab Lang, they have my contact info if they ever need a PLT legend.
Did I miss some drama?
Someone just forked a repo and put on some “statements”. Okay. There is no real effort behind this.
Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
> 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?
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?
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.
In a language like Rust isn't bureaucracy a good thing? I'm out of the loop on Rust drama FYI
If we are going to be easily offended wtf is up with the crab wielding a knife? So violent.
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.
> 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.
But somehow it is acceptable for programming languages.
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.
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.
Having a code of conduct that focuses on treating people w/ respect and discouraging personal attacks is not political, and it's strange to me that someone would label it as such.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if the safety is on?
CrabLang - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35592005 - April 2023 (77 comments)
I won't care why I'm reading about this until I can learn what I'm reading about!
This is a futile move.
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)
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”.
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…
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.
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.
If it is merged back into the main project or left unmaintained the fork failed and died.
The fork died.
that is the point. goal or no goal.
> Forks of a large project seldom survive.
That is my point.
https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/announcing-apache-openoff...
Last commit made 3 days ago, actively maintained.
> 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.
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.
MariaDB? That fork was also the result of heavy-handed lawyering over IP.
Huge suspect is that the readme doesn't explain the reason for the fork.
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.
Huh, so that's what former manufacturing regions are named after. Here I was thinking that it referred to particular oxidized metals.
\s
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.
related: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/12kze9m/how_does_rli...