Technical Editor: MissD | Source: Sifu Technology Circle
Some time ago, the Rust programming language review team suddenly announced its resignation, effective immediately. They made the announcement via their Pull Request on GitHub, which is currently locked.
The incident quickly ignited a heated discussion among overseas programmers, developers and the entire open source community.
Team member Andrew Gallant wrote in his resignation statement, The reason why the Team resigned was that “in protesting of the Core Team Placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but Themselves “(to protest that the core team put him in a position where he was accountable to no one but himself).
According to Rust’s page, the audit team was primarily responsible for “maintaining codes of conduct and community standards,” but according to the resignation, they were unable to do so, and the core team seemed to overstep those boundaries.
“Due to this structural irresponsibility, we are unable to enforce Rust’s code of conduct in accordance with the standards the community expects of us and to which we ourselves adhere,” Gallant said in his resignation. He then made four specific recommendations to the Rust community on how to move forward:
- The first is responsibility. Gallant writes that the Rust community should “agree on a core team oversight process,” which he says is currently “accountable only to itself.”
- The outgoing team suggested “replacing the audit team with Rust team members rather than core team members”.
- The prospective team “proactively decides how best to handle and detect unhealthy conflicts among Rust team members, with the advice of Rust team members,” and recommends “professional mediation.”
- Finally, new teams should “pay as much attention as possible to maintaining the healthy size and diversity of the team,” which Gallant himself fails to do.
Despite these recommendations, Rust has urgently appointed a temporary team (if not a permanent replacement) and Khionu Sybiern and Joshua Gould have been named as new members of the interim team, as can be seen from the “Audit Team” page. Among them, Gould is already a member of the Rust Community team.
The page now lists former team members as classmates, along with a message thanking “all past members for their valuable contributions!”
The team members ended their resignation letter by saying, “We avoided expressing specific grievances in an irresponsible way” because they chose to “remain discreet and confidential.” But the Rust community and its replacements are “extremely suspicious of any claims made by the core team (or its members)”.
Finally, the team members said they would be willing to contact members of the Rust team for “advice or clarification.” The letter and its ending make you wonder if the community would do the same.
The “Open Source Community Governance” topic triggered by the resignation of the Rust team
Despite the seemingly innocent nature of the Rust audit team’s resignation on Twitter, many Rustacean (as Rust developers are called) were curious as to what was going on.
Andrew Gallant’s last tweet seems to have something to do with a scuffle in early September around Rust, the core team, and Amazon, in which an article on Infoworld set off a chain of events.
According to thenewstack, which cited the report, the article was later edited with notes: “a previous version of the article correctly stated that the Rustacean principle was modeled after the amazon principle, but inadvertently may have implied that amazon was somehow responsible for Rust’s growth. Amazon employs several Rust maintainers and contributors, but it is just one of many companies that have employees involved.” Of course, the two events could be completely unrelated.
In an update to the above story, an R /Rust moderator detailed a top comment posted on the post that was later edited to say that was not the case: “In order to answer the question whether this is related to events that occurred earlier this year, @Steve Klabnik is concerned about the Rust Foundation seeking executive directors and Amazon’s influence on the Rust Foundation, we can conclude that it has nothing to do with this event: the core team is a separate division from the Rust Foundation. The Rust Foundation has since chosen an executive director, the core team and the robust team do not appear to have any connection to Amazon.”
Mara Bos, who leads the Rust Library team, takes the opposite view. She dismissed @Steve Klabnik’s claims as “total nonsense.” Andrew Gallant’s comments were picked up in two recent tweets.
Although there are few details about the incident, on the morning of Nov. 23, a former member of Rust’s audit team, Matthieu M. Just posted a separate ReDDIT thread /R/RISE where he apologized to The new CEO of Rust Foundation, Rebecca Rumbul, and three new members of the core team, JT, Jan Erik Rediger, and Ryan Levick.
“Our relationship with the core team has been deteriorating for months, and our resignation should in no way be seen as a rebuke of your nomination,” Matthieu M. wrote. I wish you all the best.”
Commenting further on the resignation of the moderate team above, Chef co-founder Adam Jacob tweeted his thoughts on the topic, “Although he has no inside information on the situation, the Rust community has been created.”
In addition to the above points of view, wetter on more open source governance issues caused by this event, also once again by the industry attention and discussion up.
The Popular programming language Rust: “Ideal versus Reality”
Back in 2016, Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey named Rust the “most popular” programming language. In 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, developers voted Rust in favor again.
From the beginning of the Rust community, the “Rustacean Principles” were developed to balance sometimes competing development priorities, such as a few features that the developers summarized:
- Reliable: If it compiles, it will work.
- Performance: Idiomatic code runs efficiently.
- Supportive: The language, tools, and community are here to help.
- Effectiveness: A little effort can accomplish a lot.
- Transparency: You can predict and control low-level details.
- Versatility: You can do anything with Rust.
We have never seen the Rust programming language look so “polished” and fresh. For this reason, there is speculation in the industry that Rust’s obsession will continue through 2022 or so.
Niko Matsakis, co-director of the Rust Programming Language Project, Shane Miller, president of the Rust Foundation, and other key members of the Rust community have also been working to ensure that Rust remains popular for years and even decades to come.
Although Rust’s motto is the Rustacean principle, it can be easily discarded when bright ideals meet harsh realities. In fact, it is these ideals that have enabled Rust to grow over the long term and become a popular programming language among developers.
This incident once again made us deeply aware that teamwork is always the most important thing between ideal and reality, and too many conflicts are not only a kind of “internal friction” for the technical team, but also a pity.
We’ll keep an eye out for more on what happens next
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