I refuse to let Amazon define Rust(twitter.com) |
I refuse to let Amazon define Rust(twitter.com) |
Plenty of successful languages have been developed by large companies.
,,they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.''
Maybe Steve (and other Rust team members) should adopt openness and stop making deals in private. That's not how open communities are built.
Yes, it typically is. However making non-falsifiable public accusations that individuals are doing "dirty shit" is not keeping things "private" and is even worse than making a concrete public statement about a concern you may have.
1. write software thats high performance 2. minimize defects 3. can be used for a variety of sitauations
There are all things I want from rust as does the community as a whole. Seems like the incentives are lined up in a way thats beneficial for everyone.
maybe someone else can educate me on something I don't know here?
What have they moved fast on and what's breaking for you?
Rust is just a single implementation that's CI'ed with nightly releases.
> “Reliable: If it compiles, it works.”
This isn't a principle. This is a subtweet.
The principle being elucidated is something more like "fully specified semantics" or "no undefined behavior". And that's fine. But phrasing it like this is (1) obviously a lie as plenty of Rust code will compile that doesn't work and (2) needlessly picking a fight with C/C++ instead of engaging productively in a discussion of tradeoffs.
Meh. It's time for Rust to start doing more and saying less, IMHO.
AFAICS much -- if not most? -- of the stuff Rust is being lavishly praised for now already existed in Nikolaus Wirth's original Pascal from the early 1970s.
1. Can you really blame it on Amazon?
2. Shouldn't you actually blaming that on other companies too, like the rest of the FAANGs for starters, for not hiring rust contributors?
3. Aren't the people involved with Rust at Amazon at fault for putting up with the supposedly dirty stuff without saying a word? The paycheck is too fat to do the right thing?
I'm honestly quite fed up with the hypocritical BS of our industry. Mr Klabnik is calling out Amazon, while not calling out the people that prefer the proverbial "fat paycheck" over "the right thing".
I'm quite fed up of people calling out FAANG and similar companies for their toxic behavior while working there in the name of the fat paycheck, or applying as often as possible to get a job there, effectively contributing to those toxic behavior (directly or indirectly).
Those people the Mr Klabnik is so explicit in defending are probably smart and competent enough to go work anywhere, there are probably a number of companies that would accept them to work on Rust. Yet they stay at Amazon.
It's not Amazon's fault here.
The fault is in the people from the Rust team deciding to work/stay at Amazon.
I call BS.
(edit: i'm getting downvoted yet this post hasn't received a proper reply yet)
I am completely willing to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt, and let them be involved in the Rust foundation as they see fit.
The great thing about open source, is that the code is open source. If enough developers don't like the way stuff is being handled, they are free to fork.
Whenever I speak to a C++ dev about why they won't switch to Rust they tell me the language is just too bloated and horrible and they prefer their version of hell to the "rustician" variant.
What positive reasons can you offer that suggest Amazon will be a good steward for Rust's continued success?
You think Rust has failed? Wow. What are your expectations for a new language to 'overtake' a behemoth in terms of adoption? Can you share any examples that underlie your expectations?
I admit ignorance when it comes to Amazon's contributions to the open source community. This is not willful -- I just have not noticed much discussion or mention of them. (We all know about their contributions to computing infrastructure of course.)
This is all speculation, I hope Steve can write a blogpost to detail clearly the situation. He already namedropped, and these tweets with scarce information only fuel confusion, which IMHO can do severe damage, as all miscommunication problems.
I was also vague about other things because they're secondary concerns to the main one. If Amazon stops trying to be in total control of Rust, I'll be happy.
Steve is suggesting Amazon is becoming a problem to the future of Rust. He is suggesting that Amazon is coming to control Rust. The evidence he is giving to this end is:
1. An Amazon employee creating Rust principles that shape the community
2. An Amazon employee being effectively in control of the Rust Foundation because there's no Executive Director atm
3. Amazon employees taking up many positions in leadership
4. Some supposed "dirty shit" going on by Amazon behind the scenes
5. The core team losing their recognition and status?
#1 would be a problem if they didn't consult the rest of leadership first or if the principles are pushing forward Amazon's own personal agenda but Steve isn't making those claims as far as I know.
#2 is a problem atm but I assume a temporary one. Steve isn't making the claim that they are not appointing an ED in order to gain power but this is a problem that remains nonetheless. Amazon should not be in control of the Rust Foundation.
#3 Amazon employees should not be able to control the Rust Foundation, if this is what is happening.
#4 Steve claims something dirty is happening behind the scenes by Amazon. Unfortunately, we don't have details on what supposedly dirty things are happening. Of course if Amazon is pushing their interests on the rest of the Rust team, that would be a problem.
#5 Steve refers to the core team being undermined but I don't understand what he means by that. Is no one listening to the core team anymore? Are they not being included in important leadership decisions? Is the core team not functioning as it was originally designed? What is the problem here specifically?
It does seem like Amazon is gaining a lot of control over Rust and that should probably be adjusted. Firstly, by appointing an executive director. I don't see any evidence of malice or agenda pushing by Amazon though. I cannot agree with Steve here without evidence. The core team should be working as intended too. It seems like Rust leadership needs to come together to discuss these issues and try to resolve them. I'm not sure why Steve is asking the community to solve them when it's leadership that has the decision-making power here.
Mozilla fired everybody, and companies heavily invested in Rust like Amazon, Facebook, etc. hired them.
So over night some people have labeled the opinions and work of these people as "Amazon opinions".
Amazon has a lot of people working on improving Rust itself, and this gives them power, because they decide on what stuff the people they are paying work on, so that stuff gets done sooner, and often better, than the stuff done by volunteers on their free time.
There are other companies invested in Rust, so if they see this as a problem, they can hire more people to work on Rust too.
Steve criticizes this, but their criticism is not constructive, since they propose no solution.
As long as people that work on Rust get paid by companies, those companies control what they work on, and that's going to be something that these companies care about.
Developers come and go, it is unreasonable to strike the big company if the future of the language is dependent on the fact that a couple of "core" devs work at it and someone is writing articles about this and that that involves Rust.
Other languages have been through worse and survived, why not Rust?
And there is no reason to believe that the growth would not have continued without Amazon's participation.
There's the simple fact that many major non Amazon companies are also supporting Rust, so I don't see how this is uniquely Amazon's contributions.
This argument appears akin to the original article's "Rustacean principles are based on Amazon tenets" BS.
Maybe, but that's only because Rust was valuable enough to them to do so. It also doesn't give them a pass on a takeover, if that is what's going on.
(No skin in this game. I just can't stand corporate gaslighting about how open source developers need to suck up abuse and like it because reasons.)
I wouldn't want a company like Google to think that Amazon has too much control over the direction of the language and choose not to use it, for example.
"Amazon must or should define Rust".
"I refuse to let you physically abuse your wife, Jim" implies something.
They may have become more formalized over time, into a sort "Six laws of Rustbotics" sort of thing. Eg.:
- First Law: “Reliable: If it compiles, it works.”
- Second Law: “Performant: Idiomatic code runs efficiently, except where doing so conflicts with the First Law.”
etc.
The crux of it all is prioritizing reliability and deterministic elimination of undefined behaviors above all other priorities. Only a handful of languages have done that in the past (Ada, Haskell, etc), but none reached mainstream acceptance in the way that Rust has. That is something new.
I'm not aware of that particular value being closely associated with Amazon, moreso than Google or any other US Big Tech company.
If not for Steve's concerns here, I would have guessed the opposite, that Rust is defining Amazon's engineering culture and principles, than the other way around.
But it also sounds like Steve is being the canary in the coalmine here, and calling out something that may not be a huge problem right now, but could become so in the foreseeable future, and implicitly calling for governance reform similar to other communities [2] to prevent it. An ounce of prevention now is worth a pound of cure later.
[1]:https://www.infoworld.com/article/3633002/the-future-of-rust...
Sometimes vendors will influence, if not in intent, in 'naturally' justifying 'intuitive' features - intuitive in the sense it might line up nicely with their future roadmaps?
Amazon has got some negative publicity with exploiting Open Source projects and using it in AWS. Recall how Oracle has 'guided' Java. Not saying that Amazon will come with its own agenda. In general Amazon has played nice with OSS.
However independently reading those documents from Amazon I felt "God, Rust seems more corporate language then even Go, Java or Swift."
Many of his peers went to work on React. Others like davidwalsh worked at Mozilla.
Any links for background on this debate?
I feared this would happen months ago when Facebook joined the board and even talked to steve about my concerns [0] [1].
Unfortunately it has come true with no surprise.
Why?
Steve Klabnik is one of my favorite technical writers. He is also an anti-capitalist. Early Rust documentation contained a lot of references to influential 20th century Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg.
I feel people like him should increasingly stand their ground instead of being apologetic about their views.
I elaborated a bit on that over here: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1397930913854590976
Elm isn't as big as Rust or other languages, but it's definitely production-grade (in that loads of companies are using it in production), and the only capital that's been put into it is approximately one full-time software engineer being paid to work on it for 5ish years.
* “Reliable: If it compiles, it works.”
* “Performant: Idiomatic code runs efficiently.”
* “Supportive: The language, tools, and community are here to help.”
* “Productive: A little effort does a lot of work.”
* “Transparent: You can predict and control low-level details.”
* “Versatile: You can do anything with Rust.”
I don't really see what the problem is. They aren't particularly Amazonian principles, and they all seem like good things to strive for.
My biggest complaint would be having Amazonians having control over feature roadmap and code acceptance. Amazon's priorities very often are in direct conflict with literally everyone else's priorities. Not to mention the fact that I've seen a lot of code at Amazon, know how nightmarish it is, and can reasonably infer that the internal politics at Amazon do not allow for, and often penalize, quality code. It is not at all unthinkable that some department with stupid priorities and lots of political clout pushes through some half-baked shit bonanza that will bite everyone else in the ass. That is a problem.
Companies & languages, the only issue I am aware of is Oracle suing Google over the use of Java. Are they concern that Amazon will sue the users of Rust language?
It is always hard to imagine how this or that corporation might be at odds with what benefits a language user community. But it is not at all hard for any particular corporation to discover such differences, or to act on those discoveries where they can.
This is unfamiliar to me - are there notable stories of what poor steering has done to a programming language? What were the consequences?
I can parse the basic grievances here on power dynamics, losing control of something you helped build…that’s familiar enough…but I’m having trouble understanding the gravity of what the author is passionate about preventing.
(In case it isn’t obvious I’ve never been a long term contributor to an open source project - genuinely curious about the context here)
https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/23/apache_tinkerpop_spee...
Why would Amazon want the founder off the project? See the following presentation which interestingly enough, is no longer indexed by DuckDuckGo nor Google:
https://www.slideshare.net/slidarko/mmadt-a-virtual-machinea...
for them to do what?
> I feared this would happen months ago
feared what would happen?
> Unfortunately it has come true with no surprise.
what has come true?
In this post and the first thread you linked, you're doing the same thing – raising concerns without saying what those concerns are. They might be valid concerns, but if you only allude to them without ever stating them, nobody will know!
We shouldn't be giving corporations too much power by letting them buy board seats in a foundation to steer the language, in this case Rust.
Rust doesn't seem community led anymore.
"Sure this company has showed evil in the past, but what specific data do you have to show that they will be evil again?"
"Sure this structure allows the company to have a lot of power, but what specifically makes you think they will abuse it?"
This kind of specious reasoning is far too common in the corporate world to remove resistance to any unpopular sentiments. There comes a point where you really have to trust your gut on something and go with it even if you cannot logically justify it in the moment. That's what separates visionaries from tacticians.
How so? Would you like to explain how you came to this conclusion?
Truly "capitalist" companies won't/can't scale beyond a few hundred employees before imploding under the weight of individualist inefficiency. I think Valve is an (in)famous example of this in the tech space.
[1] - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-0335...
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/blog-post-rustacean-princi...
However, "if it compiles, it works" is a bit more in line with Rust's unique ambitions. The rest are quite generic.
How to Rustacean
Be kind and considerate
Bring joy to the user
Show up
Recognize others’ knowledge
Start somewhere
Follow through
Pay it forward
Trust and delegate
Leadership is usually representative of merit, and merit comes from putting in the work.
"Oh, representative of mega-corp, we can't do that . I agree it's a great idea and I would love to do it, but the zealots would revolt."
1 - http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p213...
The fact that you're obviously trying to paint a legitimate worry as overwrought histrionics by spelling "worried" as "outraged" would seem to indicate you're already leaning towards the latter -- perhaps sufficiently so to be intentionally trying to ridicule the original worry.
No, nobody does. You keep making vague statements like this without actually saying anything.
>I assume you've read the links in my comment and the tweets
Yea, they just link to more of your own comments stating vague things like "I knew this would happen" (again, without ever saying what "this" is).
If you have concerns, state them. Otherwise this contributes nothing to the discussion.
> I don't understand why Google, Microsoft and AWS et. al are on a board of this new foundation.
> It is the structure that I am concerned about. Again, I'd rather have them just sponsor Rust, why wasn't a gold or platinum sponsorship like structure considered without placing them on the board of directors.
> We shouldn't be giving corporations too much power by letting them buy board seats in a foundation to steer the language, in this case Rust.
And even steve is concerned about the structure himself, if you have bothered to read the tweets.
Maybe you should actually read my comment and the links before replying.
What are your concerns, exactly? Do you even have any, or are you just being dramatic about "big company bad"?
1 - http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p213...
I would suggest the "reduced contributions" means that - unsurprisingly - Google thinks Chandler, Titus and co. were right and so since the C++ Committee doesn't endorse the performance goals that means C++ will gradually become less suitable for them and they should expect to begin migrating off it in the foreseeable future.
In Prague in 2020 the committee also signalled that it recognised the concerns about Undefined Behaviour from much of the C++ programmer community, but as with Epochs, the enthusiasm for actually doing anything is extremely limited, the committee promises that it doesn't want to actively make things worse if possible, which is as Antonin Scalia would say "Weak sauce".
So, I think the direction of C++ for the next decade is, maintain old C++ code, ensure opportunities for people writing books and selling consultancy, don't worry too much about making it any faster, nor any safer. Plenty of people will be happy with that. Lots more will not.
One of the things to watch from Google will be whether it deprioritizes LLVM or mostly Clang. Lots of other interesting projects care about LLVM and traditionally benefited from work done to make Clang better, but if Clang ceases to be the priority the LLVM work still needs to be done.
I was, like Steve, rooting for you. Not so sure now...
Where did I say "big company bad"?, I'm not against them sponsoring a project, they shouldn't get the opportunity to buy a board seat, which is what Rust's structure allows. Hence why, it's appearing that Rust isn't being led by the community.
Before you continue to gaslight me again, you can have companies (big ones) that sponsor a project/foundation and not be given a board seat.
I can understand the desire here for more details so that others can come to a firmer conclusion but try to put yourself in Steve's shoes. It is very hard to publicly criticize some of the behavior of a group you are a member of without burning bridges or deeply harming relationships. At the same time, saying nothing publicly is read as tacit approval.
I interpret the article as a giving Amazon credit for why people like Rust, and Steve's response as a public disagreement saying that such credit is unwarranted and gives Amazon more power than it should have over Rust's future direction.
Corporate entities don't really care about "inclusiveness" or "minimizing conflict".
So, Rust governance will either grow the structures and leadership to "manage conflict" or get steamrolled.
Not really sure I am convinced on the result of languages and frameworks managed by big tech, although I believe Amazon to perhaps be the better players among them.
In another comment, Steve said he was not a member of the Rust Foundation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28514771
(*): "community membership" is necessarily somewhat nebulous, but Steve is, undeniably, a member of the Rust community.
The Rust Foundation lost its main sponsor, because Mozilla pulled out... that's a spectacular betrayal. Amazon comes in with a better offer to support the language. Why say no?
Klabnik doesn't like it, but the simple and sad truth is that Mozilla abandoned Rust.
edit: this post was pure speculation and I was corrected by Steve Klabnik in a reply :)
To summarize:
* Amazon has too much administrative influence
* Amazon has marginalized the core team
* also un-stated dirty tricks by Amazon
I think rust is great, and I love with the rust community has accomplished, and I wouldn't want to see Amazon break that. But from this thread I don't know enough to raise objections. It sounds like a Rust foundation governance issue, the sort of thing that comes up from time-to-time on most big successful projects.
[edited to fix formatting]
> And now they want to actually take Amazon's principles and claim that they're Rust's.
These just... literally... aren't Amazon's principles. At all. "The practice of coming up with pithy statements to guide decision-making" is the Amazon part.
> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
This sounds like the real concern, and it sounds really concerning, and I hope people come out to speak publicly and candidly about it. But it doesn't seem sensible to pretend that the making a list of adjectives is itself malign.
Their website contains only anodyne director bios and board meeting minutes. The minutes go up to May's meeting, with most of the content omitted under a "Private Session" heading.
AIUI the main need for a foundation was so they could own the Rust domain names and trademarks. Eight months later, I've seen no announcement on whether any progress has been made with this.
If contributors can’t tolerate corporate sponsorship, then there is an abundance of languages with little to no commercial interest, especially those of academic origins.
However, I also think that his tweet might be more in the pre-emptive vein of "cease and desist" leveraging his personal standing in the community instead of actually getting into a war with Amazon's side. The objective seems to be basically to let them know that if they continue with their current behavior, it will be met with resistance. He is taking a risk though because we don't know enough to have an informed view of the actions that might have triggered this.
It seems to me that he has tried to make a point in private, but it got dismissed.
It's very common to see power structures evolve into an unbalanced state, even with everybody trying to do the best thing.
Hopefully some spotlights are enough to get to a workable balance.
Also note that leaders of teams don't have many special rights. They are more primus inter pares than bosses. This doesn't mean that people don't listen to them, but it's more informal and due to respect of the individual from what I can see. Respect that they'd lose if they supported some crazy Amazon idea that is harmful for the language.
As for core team vs foundation issues. I share concerns voiced in the community that the foundation is intransparent. But ultimately, the core team as well as the foundation don't do day to day operation of the language.
Maybe Steve sees something that I don't, and he's certainly in a better position to see things, but I don't see much of a threat, at least not right now.
To clarify, is that happening, or is that a warning that vigilance is needed to ensure it doesn't happen?
The mere act of taking money, and Amazon presumably pays them a lot, is not immoral.
It only starts to be a problem if larger percentages of the teams work at Amazon, and people would be put onto teams just for being employed at Amazon. Linus Torvalds has made it clear that he doesn't make people maintainers for some component just for being employed somewhere. Instead of being bound to a company, maintainership is bound to the person. I think this is a good policy and one that Rust should keep.
- The Board of the Rust Foundation intentionally let the contract for the current acting Executive Director (ED) of the Rust Foundation lapse.
- It was intentional because it would have been easy to extend the contract but it was chosen not to.
- The lack of ED gives Amazon a great deal of control as the Chair of the Rust Foundation.
- There may be some underhanded or subjectively dirty things being done by Amazon administratively or PR-wise regarding Rust.
- Because of the power imbalance created by the lack of ED, those actions are a cause for concern.
- Regardless of how/why/who caused this, regardless of intent for administration, this situation should be fixed.
Solution: The Board of the Rust Foundation needs to pick the damn ED and establish limits on membership affiliation like other projects.
Niko is a long-term participant in Rust, and former core-team member (https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core), who's made huge contributions. However, it's not clear to me what that co-lead reference means. The closest that comes up is that he's a co-lead of the rust language team, which is distinct from the core team. Quite possible I'm missing something, would love to see someone make it more clear.
Source: https://twitter.com/sheevink/status/1437446217806528523. I personally am not saying the article is misleading, just that I am confused.
As leadership/control seems to be mostly on the domain name, name, logo and Github repository; at this point it's possible to fork the project and move to another leadership. There is enough traction, in my opinion, that the "marginalized core devs" could take on the project again. The contributions made by Amazon could then be merged selectively.
I wrote a while ago my thoughts here:
>> We spent years trying to get away from this situation. It had tons of negative effects.
>> Why are we regressing here?
Amazon has an interest in using Rust to help build their software, probably for heavy use in AWS.
Amazon also has a lot of money and talent that can help Rust continue to grow and improve.
It is a delicate balance to accept help and resources, but not let Amazon take too much control.
What should be done?
I can assure you she would have been happy to continue to be the executive director.
I talked about this briefly in the thread, but wasn't quite clear enough, so might as well also elaborate here, since it was brought up. I am not worried that she will not be the next ED. I mean, I would have preferred it, but it's not my decision to make. The structural issue here is that the foundation decided to forgo extending her contract while looking for a new ED; this means that the foundation currently does not have one, and we don't know when a new one is coming. During that time, the chair of the board has more power than they usually would, and Amazon is chair of the board.
>What a bullshit. Steve is absolutely right that the 'core team' is becoming less relevant. But that's not because Amazon is taking over. The core team hasn't really been steering or leading Rust anymore. Other team members have been doing that. Many of which don't work at Amazon.
>Oh and one thing I should say too: suggesting that core doesn’t do anything during the same year we managed the implosion of Mozilla and the creation of the foundation is incredibly disrespectful to those on core who did all of that intense work.
As an outsider, I felt that Mozilla lend credibility to Rusts efforts, and Rust gave Mozilla relevance.
> Editor’s note: A previous version of the article correctly stated that the Rustacean Principles were modeled after Amazonian tenets, but unintentionally may have implied that Amazon was somehow responsible for Rust development. Amazon employs several Rust maintainers and contributors, but it is just one of many companies with employees involved.
[1]: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3633002/the-future-of-rust...
1. Core members are burnt out.
2. This is not their primary skill set (administration vs engineering/community building).
Other languages have been blessed with an administrative group (GvR/Python[0], Hickey/Clojure), corporate sponsor (Pike/Go), or committee (C++, Java). The counterpart for Rust is core member/Mozilla, but there is no appetite for this responsibility.
0: I like this talk about governance models at Pycon 2019, after GvR stepped down as BFDL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAC83JVDzL8
The thread starts with a (vague) statement against Amazon trying to expand its control on the Rust project.
It later ends up being a spat between rust team members (who aren't a part of Amazon) on the role of the Core team.
I feel Steve does not have enough support among the members of the rust teams for whatever he was going for with this. The derailing of the discussion also makes it seem as if there are other issues at play.
Sadly, this may end up amounting to nothing more than burnt bridges.
And Amazon as heavy users of Rust have people on the committees? What's the process to getting them those seats? Voting?
> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
How?
OpenSource politics is sometimes the worst.
Wrote a fluff article about how Rust principles originated with Amazon, which is rank nonsense.
I like Rust, and want to know if there's a real issue, however.
PR pieces are usually full of deception. I expect that Rust Foundation will end up with a process for approving Rust-related PR from supporting organizations. They will pay someone to do that work.
So far, Rust has been run by people who behave reasonably. I'm confident that they will resolve this issue. They will resolve it with open discussion, expressing and acknowledging different opinions and needs, explaining tradeoffs, and progressing steadily to consensus.
Here's a great talk by previous Rust head Ashley Williams about Rust's decision-making process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLstJFvdl4s&t=1808s
Some articles about it:
- http://aturon.github.io/tech/2018/05/25/listening-part-1/#th...
- http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2020/12/30/the-...
That aside I'm convinced this is the fate of all board/complicated governance structure popular open source project. If you make the governance structure that mirrors corporate constructions, people who work at big corporations and know how the politics work are going to find themselves right at home.
I don't know what the solution is, you can't expect every project to have a BDFL and there is a lot of work to be done on a huge open source project, but I always see the adoption of a corporation-like governance structure without explicit limitation on the power/influence of involved groups/corporations as a red flag.
Steve mentions it himself but the idea that Mozilla is anything like Amazon is a farce. I'd trust Mozilla to build me a browser (they do), a phone (they did), a physical computer and whatever else because of how they're structured, what they profess, and their track record. I'd trust Amazon to do none of those things (mostly because I thankfully have other options right now). Mozilla supported this project from it's inception and has made it what it is (along the way reducing it's own influence to make sure there was no misconception). Amazon has no such track record that I know of, and it's corporate structure does not suggest any alternative driving force outside of maximizing profit.
The contributors who happen to work at Amazon who were able to contribute to Rust under Amazon's largesse (whether direct or indirect) deserve the status they have achieved within Rust, but there is a conflict of interest. If that conflict of interest grows, then it has to be addressed.
I'd pretty much prefer that none of those companies have any role in defining Rust – but, instead, they seem to be about the only ones who do.
The people they send to meetings on a regular basis do a great deal of important work, and they often disagree among themselves. But sometimes marching orders evidently come down.
There was a recent concerted effort to define a process to determine when and where backward ABI compatibility should be abandoned, which would have made it much easier to bring about such occasions.
Maintaining a list of individually unobjectionable principles seems innocuous, but it is via the principles omitted from the list being thereby made harder to appeal to that you can get bad results. And, the more there are, the easier it is to reject this or that request.
> The power of rust is that it's for the people... not for massive orgs to wield in order to make more money
Given that most rust code is licensed under non-copyleft licenses (MIT, etc.) I wonder where this impression came from? I have always had the impression that rust was exactly that - just another tool for massive orgs to make more money.
In contrast, a language ecosystem more like elisp, where most code is GPLed seems more "for the people".
Is Amazon hiring existing members of the Rust Foundation such that they weren't involved with Amazon but now are? e.g. paying these people to work on Rust but under Amazon's terms?
Isn't it then up to the Rust Foundation to declare this a conflict of interest, perhaps, and to sever ties with that member?
That said, Mozilla really did drop the ball by laying off all their staff on the Rust project and effectively defunding it. They might have well have created a power vacuum and Amazon beat Microsoft to the punch.
Amazon has enough money (and no moral or ethics) to take Rust and twist the reality to make people believe Amazon is right and Rust community is wrong.
Let's watch the show.
But will Google let Go rust away?
https://postgresql.fund/blog/is-it-time-to-modernize-postgre...
This year they changed their bylaws to say that no more than a quarter of the directors may share an affiliation.
https://github.com/VanL/psf-bylaws/compare/9666a3a397c30fa7c...
(As far as I can make out, previously they just said that directors had to make their affiliation publicly known.)
I'm also confused. The Tweet thread switches between Amazon and Rust Foundation almost interchangeably. Is the implication that Amazon has co-opted the Rust foundation? Are the other Rust Foundation members being sidelined? Or is this a deeper objection about the existence of a corporate-sponsored Rust Foundation?
I'm also confused by the claims that "Amazon has decided not to have a Rust Foundation ED" when the Rust Foundation is in the midst of an Executive Director search: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-06-25-announcing...
--- cut here ---
sorry, the tweet length got me here!
they have temporarily forgone an ED. that is, they deliberately did not retain the existing temporary ED while this process went on
Bingo.
If Amazon would be in the drivers' seat, that incentive structure would seem much less clear.
You can either see his history and trust that he wants to get as much done with as little said as possible or say you trust Amazon. Either is understandable but I think it's reasonable to be a known member of a community and speak up just enough to hopefully get the ball rolling in a better direction.
Or I can trust neither, and expect that both sides act like adults and actually state their concerns and accusations rather than vague "just trust me, you should be upset" statements.
Whipping everyone into a furor with vague concerns without actually giving enough information to address those concerns is the worst form of "discussion", if you can even call it that.
Unfortunately, it seems we're getting the worst of both worlds: The dirty laundry is being aired in this thread, but the actual details are being withheld.
From the Tweet thread:
> they've also taken steps to marginalize the core team. and some other dirty shit I won't say rn.
I'm not a fan of these "just trust me" accusations.
The not airing dirty laundry and not detailing the issue means no one knows what is going on and no one can help.
If it's a private fight I would understand if they wanted to keep it private. If it's a public issue what is happening.
The post you linked to above links to a YouTube video[1] where he describes where the principles came from: some "design tenets" he came up with to help guide design of the async feature in Rust. Later he realized that they weren't specific to the async work, but were more about Rust in general. There has since been a lot of iteration involving others in the Rust community, and he's no longer calling them tenets.
And really, if you actually read the principles themselves, do they really sound like they're based on the design tenets that AWS uses? They sound an awful lot like principles that the Rust community has been using, but never articulated before. Maybe some more iteration is necessary, but it doesn't look very sinister.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5raEKA57PMY
(Disclosure, I'm an Amazon employee and am familiar with how Amazon uses Tenets for teams)
> This sounds like the real concern
I actually think it distracts from their argument. Either say something or don 't. What purpose do vague accusations have here? Scare Amazon into behaving so not to get bad press? If the actions are concerning enough that Amazon should not have full-control, then why wouldn't those actions still not be pertinent if they do not define Rust.
When is there not? Tweets are a horrible medium for contextual information.
This reads like drama for the sake of drama.
Edit: I should have said that posting this to HN is just posting drama. Using twitter to vent is fine, just not newsworthy in any way.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3633002/the-future-of-rust...
Steve is probably objecting to the paragraph that starts, "Given that Matsakis and Miller both work at AWS, it's not surprising that the [Rustacean] principles started out as a spin on Amazonian tenets."
Would it be better if Rust was a part of the Apache foundation?
Many people think that the best thing for projects like this is to have as many entities involved as possible. Anything that is controlled by single entity is bound to forget the needs of others.
For example: neither Mozilla nor Amazon might have Embedded Systems as a core interest, so they will forget about it and might accidently make decisions that ate bad for this use cases. If you also have ARM, Microcontroller vendors and so on on board, they will make sure that this topic isn't overlooked.
Ahem.
Even though Mozilla was pretty hands-off from Rust, management wise, one thing being in control of something like this just has a lot of effects. I'm not really prepared to go into a full retro of Mozilla's involvement with Rust here, I just wanted to note that there was also a lot of good there.
There's also the "if the company goes evil the project may also be affected", like Red Hat pulling the carpet under CentOS or many other examples.
Also, without a generous benefactor, open source languages have to scrape funding together piecemeal from different sources. For example, both Rust and Go have had (or still have) dedicated staff writing documentation for the language. This is a luxury that other languages (e.g. Nim or Crystal) cannot fund or afford.
All languages want to attract developers and a key question is: how can languages without a big corporate benefactor attract funding to help grow the language and build related libraries?
RIP.
And apparently that couldn't change until Rust went off on its independent journey.
However, with the exception of some communication missteps around the licensing changes (which actually ended up in fully open source JDK, as opposed to the mostly open source JDK in Sun's time), Java has actually done great under Oracle.
Amazing what having resources can do for a project, eh?
I mean, I'm not thrilled with the licensing model around GraalVM (since it's another "mostly" open source situation), but business is business, I guess. I'd personally prefer that they treat it the same as Java proper, and fund it via support contracts/subscriptions.
The linked Tweet thread is specifically directed at the Rust Foundation, not the general Rust community.
Steve Klabnik is obviously a member of the Rust community.
That is perhaps the biggest concern.
When a large tech company controls governance, their needs and priorities come first.
We have seen similar concerns with other programming languages in the past: Java (Sun / Oracle), Go (Google), Swift (Apple).
Exclusive or dominant control is not necessarily bad (depends on how transparently the governance process runs and who is involved), but it can severely limit the programming language community's effect and leave the needs of some groups unfulfilled.
I thought that was CA? Oh wait, no, that's where they go after they're dead.
Feel free to disregard the trailing sentence. However, it's not fair do discard each and any substantiated accusation by trying to shift the attention to a passing comment, specially a common one which is used as a figure of speech.
That problem is fundamental. As soon as one entity gets too much control, it's impossible to wrest control back without their agreement, or a long protracted battle which will hurt the thing being fought over.
Nobody is saying keep corporate interests completely divorced, this is just a call to be aware that one interest is getting too much power, whether on purpose or just through increased interest on their part, but the end result is the same. If we care about Rust not being beholden to one entity at the expense of others, then action should be taken now (even if that action is just much increased scrutiny and asking Amazon to please make sure the executive directory position is filled ASAP, and not with someone Amazon affiliated).
Which... I find it hard to imagine a random selection of individuals, the majority of which wouldn't be susceptible to that. Everyone has to eat, and there are always catastrophes in business eventually.
https://postgresql.fund/blog/postgres-core-team-attacks-post...
Writing tenets is a tool, like making a checklist is a tool. You can use the idea of making a checklist without using the checklist items.
[1] https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2021/09/08/rus...
Can you elaborate? IME Rust development is as transparent as ever.
What has changed since the beginning is that there are more working groups these days. For example, there are working groups specializing in SIMD and error handling, among many others (they just happen to be the ones I follow in particular). The working groups generally work toward writing an RFC for the broader community to give feedback on. But working groups themselves are open to anyone, and they aren't difficult to join. (And you don't even need to "join" to participate. You just have to show up and start giving feedback.) The key point here is that the RFC process is still used, same as it always has been.
To be clear, working groups and the Rust teams choose their own membership. Neither Amazon nor the Rust Foundation have any say.
It is well maintained and high performance :)
After reading the comments, I think that this one [0] even directly shared the same structure concerns [1] you are bringing up and not giving companies like Amazon too much control.
Don't put this on the LF, this is definitely on the folks who bootstrapped the foundation and setup the governance in the way they did.
https://foundation.rust-lang.org/policies/bylaws/#section-2....
>The Foundation shall have five classes of membership: Platinum Members, Gold Members, Silver Members, Associate Members, and Individual Members.
At the same time though, there doesn't seem to be a general way for becoming one now:
>The Individual Members of the Foundation shall initially be the members of the Core Team, as defined in Section 5.5(b) below, and may be extended to other individual maintainers of the Projects and subject to any other qualifications as may from time to time be established by the Board.
If you find a time when you feel your head is clear enough to write a detailed summary I'm sure many others would benefit from reading it as well. It's probably important to ensure that anything like this is written when your emotions are extremely well-managed, and also important to run it by many of the coolest, most-level headed colleagues that you trust -- and heavily weight their revisions.
I also congratulate the Rust team on getting to a point where they've made something valuable enough that worrying about regressive corporate influence is even warranted. I really do owe Rustaceans a large thanks for building something I enjoy so much.
Hopefully Rust can grow in a healthy way with generous corporate support, and find the guardrails necessary to mitigate the usual negative consequences that come along with the benefits.
>Again, specifically: what control are you worried about? I suspect that you think the foundation has powers it does not have. [0]
These statements seem somewhat contradictory to me. Did something changed in the last few months?
Tenets are used as quick statements to validate decisions. And the tenants are always up for debate and revision.
Using 'AWS tenets' isn't some nefarious way to control Rust. It's borrowing a useful (IMO) management/decision making structure to help guide decisions. Using 'AWS tenants' doesn't give AWS undue influence anymore than using the concept of Andon cords gives Toyota undue influence.
Engineers are really relying on the Rust Foundation to do right by them, and by adopting Amazon or other big tech company principles it’s spitting in the face of engineers who don’t trust them and adding the potential for bias in decision making of the foundation.
I’m hopeful that the Amazon contributors will understand this and show full support.
The tenets of the team I work on are stuff like 'treat every customer like your best friend on their worst day'. And 'learn something new every day'. They are tenets of a team in AWS, which makes them (to some extent) 'AWS tenets'.
Are they somehow nefarious because there are people who don't trust anything that remotely relates to Amazon? Or are they innocuous statements of intent that are applicable to most companies?
You don't have to like or trust Toyota to use Andon cords. You don't have to like or trust McKinsey to use the 7-S framework. You don't have to like or trust Motorola to use Six Sigma. You don't have to like or trust Amazon to use 'AWS tenets'.
Oh, don't post this kind of personal attacks.
Guess which FAANG company has de facto control of the foundation now? I'll give you two hints: it starts with A and isn't Apple.
---
From the comments Steve has made it sounds like Amazon effectively has control of Rust not only because of their large involvement but also because a strange set of governing circumstances. I guess I can see how if he led with that it might be clearer why all the concern, guess he didn't want to spell it out so directly and point fingers.
That's two out of three grievances that have no substance whatsoever. You cannot have a serious conversation about these things if there is not more detail. I'm not distracting from anything, I'm asking Steve to either step up and discuss these things as he stated he wants to do, or he needs to stop distracting from serious issues with these snarky one-liners. If you include something like that in a tweet, you should expect to follow up on it.
It's ridiculous and disingenuous to tweet something like that and then say "well I don't actually want to talk about that and it's your fault for not reading my mind to know that".
>That's probably why takes like that get downvoted.
My comment currently has 50 upvotes. I don't think I'm the only person saying this.
I don’t fault him as he didn’t post it here but it is definitely not fully clear from reading it what’s going on.
> that Amazon "marginalized the core team" (but no details)
That seems like details to me. It's also extrapolated on elsewhere here.
> That's two out of three grievances that have no substance whatsoever. You cannot have a serious conversation about these things if there is not more detail.
Actually, you could, just by ignoring the things you don't see evidence of and focusing on the points that do, and assessing them based on merit.
The messenger is irrelevant if the message is verifiable and is worth discussing. It's useful to call out points that seem to not be backed up, or be purposefully vague. It's not fine to use that as a reason to ignore other points because "you cannot have a serious conversation" when that's obviously not the case when it's not tried.
There is no substance to the tweets (it's his twitter account, go wild), and really has no business being here.
I am not a member of the foundation and so can't really speak to what is being spent currently. As far as I know a public budget has not been posted.
The risk is that they can set the direction to anything. They might be amazing stewards, they might spend it all on useless things. We don't yet know. I do know that many of the folks in the foundation have their hearts in the right place.
Again, the theme isn't about specific actions, it is about consolidation of control.
(I also thought they were saying the foundation was exerting control over the language, which is incorrect, strictly speaking. The foundation has no formal powers over the language itself.)
I expect that it was a group decision and not a sole one. But again, my point is not about how that happened, my point is that it has happened, and what that means for the state of the organization as a whole, that is, that leadership is concentrated in a single organization.
1: https://foundation.rust-lang.org/posts/2021-06-25-announcing...
She worked to ensure it become a critical part of the Rust/Wasm ecosystem and then silently stopped maintaining it. For most of 2020 / 2021 `wasm-pack` was not updated with pull requests and security fixes because Ashley did not transfer publish rights.
Even though `wasm-pack` became unusable for many users it was still described as necessary in the official Rust / Wasm tutorials. Likely this set back the Rust/Wasm ecosystem by discouraging many new members.
It would have been far better if she just spoke up and asked for help.
It seems she wanted to ignore a problem she didn't want to deal with, which I can relate to, but that's not a good quality in an executive director.
Some relevant GitHub issues: https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/914 https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/928
“There are 2 entities which make decisions...the contract for the person holding the post of 1 of those 2 entities was not extended by the other entity, and the other entity has not given any timeline on when they expect to fulfill that position, therefore leading to a situation where it’s the only entity with power” is not “I want it run by my pal”.
No, you really can't. Just by including the other points in the discussion, but being unwilling to extrapolate on them, shows bad faith (perhaps unintentionally) on the part of Steve and compromises the entire discussion. The only reason you include some vague "Amazon did shady shit" in a tweet is to elicit an emotional response on the part of the reader and immediately biases the argument against Amazon. The argument is not based on merit; it never can be now, because it's been tainted. This is known as "poisoning the well" [0].
Even in this thread, commenters are saying how they implicitly trust Steve not because of the merits of his argument, but because of his personal brand. He's (again, perhaps unintentionally) taking advantage of that fact by mud-slinging at Amazon, priming readers to already be biased against Amazon, and then once called out on it the response is "oh just ignore the fact that I did that and look at this other argument which I promise is more substantive". That's not arguing in good faith.
I see all that Steve has done for Rust and I see him post here (and on reddit) a lot, so I have respect for him. But this "discussion" was brought up completely the wrong way by him, and any outcome is going to be tainted. It'd be best to just let this current discussion die, and bring it up again in the future in a more appropriate manner.
That seems a bit strong. The statement was "won't go into rn (right now)".
> compromises the entire discussion.
It does. I'm not saying it causes no problems. I'm saying it shouldn't be grounds to immediately discount all other evidence given. It's perfectly valid as a modifier to another piece of evidence where you might use it to weight it, but I don't think it's valid to immediately ignore everything else said.
> The only reason you include some vague "Amazon did shady shit" in a tweet is to elicit an emotional response on the part of the reader and immediately biases the argument against Amazon.
No, that's one possible reason, it's not the only reason. Other possible reasons might be to signal other people more involved in the events in question that if they want to share their own story, perhaps now is the time and opening that makes that easier for them.
I agree that the presented argument would have been better without that statement, but that doesn't immediately negate the merit of what else is presented.
> The argument is not based on merit; it never can be now, because it's been tainted. This is known as "poisoning the well" [0].
The mistake you're making is in assuming that poisoning the well applies to and discredits non-dependent clauses. It should be easy to see how this applies when you consider the two statements "You should beware of John, he's made some threatening gestures to me and you in the past, and I there's been some assaults in the area" and "You should beware of John, he's threatening gestures to me and you in the past and multiple people have seen him assault three people recently." In one case it's used to imply guilt of something that is not factually proven or stated, in the other there's a fact to readily look into for confirmation that you can use as evidence to make up your own mind. That someone uses a call to emotion beforehand should not immediately discount that fact from consideration.
> Even in this thread, commenters are saying how they implicitly trust Steve not because of the merits of his argument, but because of his personal brand.
That's not what I've said, and not what I'm asking of you.
> But this "discussion" was brought up completely the wrong way by him, and any outcome is going to be tainted.
It may be tainted in some way. That doesn't mean easily verifiable facts should be ignored.
To be absolutely clear, since it seems very hard for some people to get my point, I have no qualms with your mistrusting him, or thinking his factual statements have no merit or are not problematic enough to act on. I just don't think it's valid to completely ignore the factual statements and refuse to consider them as you seemed to indicate you were doing because he also says "Amazon is being a meany in other ways too" and doesn't expound on it, and some other statements may not be as well supported as they could.
What merit? Lets take the claim of "marginalized the core team"?
WTF does that even mean? As in specifically, what was the action that amazon did, to marginalize anyone? Did they say mean things about them? Did they have a meeting without them? Did they kick them off of a group? Did they create a feature roadmap, without getting the core teams feedback?
Just say specifically what happened, with actual details, that describe exactly how someone was marginalize, and the consequences of that!
> reason to ignore other points
What other points? Specifically? The only verifiable point, that anyone has mentioned, is that amazon has a board seat somewhere, on some organization.
But even that point is low on details. Have they used the board seat to do anything bad? Whats the concern?
You mean, "let's take an acillary claim, not one of the core three" that are stated to be "undefinable(sp). they're just facts."?
My point, which I thought was clear, but apparently not, is that if you have a problem with the statement you brought up, sure, mention that's problematic. But is that a reason to ignore the things mentioned immediately prior, that Amazon is the lead on multiple teams, and chose not elect a new executive directory while letting the prior one go? I think not. Those are specific claims that can be assessed individually. What bearing does the "they've marginalized the core team" statement have on them that renders them being unworthy to assess?
> What other points? Specifically? The only verifiable point, that anyone has mentioned, is that amazon has a board seat somewhere, on some organization.
That exact same tweet you reference notes they've decided not to have an Executive Director. Maybe if people weren't ignoring that because of some later statement that might get some attention.
Its not ignoring! Its asking people to say what the actual problem is, beyond just that Amazon has people on a couple committees.
Have these committees done anything bad? Is amazon pushing for features that people don't like? Will some future bad thing happen because of this? What is the value statement here!
> Those are specific claims that can be assessed individually.
Ok, and the problem is that nobody is actually saying why some things are bad or not.
> that might get some attention.
I still don't know why it should get attention though. So they don't have an executive director? Why should anyone care?
You keep trying to say things, without saying why anyone should care about this stuff, or why it is bad.
I could make a dozen different guesses as to why you, or others, think there is a problem. But I shouldn't have to do that.
It is on you, to both say what is happening, as well as for you to say why it is bad, and what the concern is.
There is an easy and appropriate response to this - just fork() the project under a new name. There's nothing wrong with this, especially when the maintainer doesn't respond to community inquiries. People in the open source community are generally volunteers, so we shouldn't expect or require them to "speak up" if it can be avoided.
First, wasm-pack is not Ashley's personal project, it is an official Rust Wasm project. That means it is owned by the Rust Wasm team, and it is maintained by the Rust Wasm team. It is an official part of Rust, similar to how cargo and rustdoc are an official part of Rust. wasm-pack was never intended to be maintained only by Ashley.
Multiple Rust Wasm Core team members (including myself) politely asked Ashley multiple times to transfer publishing rights to the Rust Wasm Core team (which she was supposed to have done months ago), but she refused.
Multiple people had politely offered to take over maintenance of wasm-pack (when it was clear that Ashley was unwilling to do so), but once again she refused. She knew how important wasm-pack is to Rust Wasm, but she did not want to give up control and power, even though it wasn't even supposed to be her package in the first place.
Second, forking is not as simple or as easy as you claim... forking is something that has a very high cost, so it should be done as a last resort. wasm-pack is an official Rust package (and it is vital to Rust Wasm), and so forking it would have a lot of costs:
* A new crate would have to be created (what should it be called? wasm-pack2?)
* The GitHub repo would have to be changed or transferred.
* Multiple different documentation websites (including the official Rust website) would need to be updated.
* A newsletter would need to be sent out informing everybody of the change.
* All existing projects would need to switch to the new package.
* The old package would still exist, which would be very confusing for people, especially because many tutorials and blogs would still be referring to the old wasm-pack!
* Ashley herself would throw a huge tantrum over it, because she would view it as taking control away from herself. And because she is a Rust Core team member, her tantrum would have power behind it.
Forking is absolutely NOT an appropriate solution in this case. Ashley's behavior was simply wrong, unacceptable, and reflects very poorly on the Rust team (which she is a part of).
As for Ashley's personal character... before she worked for Rust, she worked for npm. While she was working there, she tried to falsely accuse Rod Vagg because she wanted to kick him out of npm. Thankfully she failed, and after she failed she quit npm:
https://thenewstack.io/node-js-forked-complaints-repeated-ha...
https://medium.com/@rvagg/the-truth-about-rod-vagg-f063f6a53...
While she was working for npm, she violated npm's Code of Conduct numerous times, saying incredibly horrible sexist and racist things such as "kill all men", and actively trying to prevent white men from speaking at tech conferences:
No, she was not joking, and even if it was "just a joke" it is unacceptable. If a man said "kill all women" even as a joke he would be immediately fired and blacklisted from all companies.
Despite all of this, she was still hired onto the Rust Core team, because she is in a romantic relationship with Steve Klabnik (nepotism). Interestingly, Steve Klabnik is also the same person who is smearing Amazon because Amazon denied a job to Ashley.
The Rust Core team was aware of Ashley's past behavior, yet they hired her anyways. And even though numerous people spoke out about this, they were silenced and censored by the Rust team:
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/announcement-ashley-willia...
Ashley also abused her moderator powers to ban dakom, even though he had done nothing wrong:
https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/914
https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/928
She also made numerous lies in those two threads (such as claiming that the Rust Wasm Core team is "random people without organization", the Rust Wasm Core team is hand-picked, they are the official leaders of Rust Wasm).
She acted incredibly disrespectful toward the Rust Wasm team (who worked very hard to make Rust work on Wasm), even though she had contributed basically nothing.
There is a dark side to Rust, which everybody is afraid to talk about. Anybody who tries to discuss things is censored by the Rust Core team. That's why I stopped contributing to Rust and I will never go back.
Look a the comment I originally responded to. They complained that two out of three items had no substance, therefore we can't have a serious conversation. That is, specifically, what I was addressing.
> I still don't know why it should get attention though. So they don't have an executive director? Why should anyone care?
> You keep trying to say things, without saying why anyone should care about this stuff, or why it is bad.
It's specifically stated in the tweet. Not having an executive director leaves the chair with more power. Amazon is the chair. Amazon has chosen to let the position go unfilled which results in their own position having more power.
He goes into more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28513656
Actually asking questions about that, like you are here, is the outcome I was calling for, as opposed to ignoring it because of other statements, as the original comment I replied to was.
> It is on you, to both say what is happening, as well as for you to say why it is bad, and what the concern is.
No, you're placing me as someone on the one side of the argument, when the side is irrelevant. My point was that ignoring everything said because of portions that don't add up is not a valid way to assess the information. That doesn't require me to take a side, and in fact taking a side just makes it easier to people to dismiss my point and assume my goal is something else, as I suspect you did.
The problem is that, it is pretty clear, that based on how many people have agree with me, that this guy was unclear.
There was obviously a lot of confusion here. And that is a valid criticism of this person.
> My point was that ignoring everything said
The fact that so many people are confused about what the guy is saying, is on him.
He should have communicated better. And no, it is not everyone else's fault, that basically everyone misunderstood his point.
> He goes into more detail here
Well maybe he should have done a better job of communicating his ideas, from the very beginning. That's on him.
The fact that he was so bad at saying what the problem was, and why we should care, from the very beginning, is a valid problem.
> is not a valid way to assess the information.
No, it is not on the public to have to cross reference hacker news posts, with tweets, with blogs posts, to figure out why we should care.
That is the job of the communicator. And if you communicate it poorly, then that is your failing.
If you care about why I think it's not worth continuing, and why I've come to this conclusion, I suggest you attempt to re-read what I wrote previously with a more open mind and instead of trying to drag it back into the specific argument. In any case, have a good evening.
The summary of that statement is "During that time, the chair of the board has more power than they usually would, and Amazon is chair of the board."
But once again, he is refusing to give the actual, moral punchline here.
If he wanted to convince people, he could explain all the dastardly things that he believes the board could do now. But he doesn't do that. All he says, is another statement that is devoid of moral argument, which is that "amazon is chair of the board" and that the board has more power.
The way to actually make an argument, is to not simply state facts. Instead you should say why people should care about these facts, and describe the actual material harm.
> , but I don't see a reason to continue my part in this conversation
Yes, I get it. When someone brings up the fact that basically everyone is pretty confused about the situation, and brings up how poorly this guy communicated, you have no response, and just want to assert you that you disagree, without backing it up.