Rust has always been favored by developers and many technology companies for its ability to provide excellent memory safety protection, concurrency, and efficient programming experience . However, as a language that is very successful in terms of features and adoption rate, Rust’s project governance has many problems.
The bureaucratic behavior of the Rust Foundation for a long time has caused complaints from users in the Rust open source community, and the recent “trademark farce” has pushed the internal turmoil of Rust to a climax. In the end, some community members who could not tolerate the power of the Rust Foundation forked Rust and created the CrabLang community.
Fork triggered by outrageous draft
In fact, in terms of background, the relationship between the Rust Foundation and the open source community is already on thin ice. In April of this year, the Rust Foundation solicited feedback from the community on the updated trademark policy. In the new draft, the Rust Foundation hopes to prohibit the use of “Rust” in the names of Rust-related tools or software written in Rust , and even have targeted restrictions on domain names or subdomains.
This means that if the draft policy is established, it will force many Rust-based open source projects to change their names for compliance. Many dissatisfied Rust community members have protested to the foundation, and some even said, “I hope the foundation will abandon this policy as soon as possible, otherwise it will seriously affect the development of the Rust language.”
Although under pressure from the community, the Rust Foundation ultimately issued a new statement and closed the feedback form for the draft trademark policy while attempting to quell the controversy. However, after this battle, some users who were completely disappointed with the Rust Foundation still chose to fork Rust and establish the CrabLang community branch.
CrabLang: The New Utopia
In CrabLang’s official introduction, they stated that the creation of the community branch is a response to the restrictive trademark policies proposed by enterprises and foundations . The new draft of the Rust Foundation is the reason for the community fork, and CrabLang hopes to solve this problem in a better way.
CrabLang’s goal is not to replace Rust , and if users and community members are satisfied with the current state of Rust, CrabLang will encourage users to continue using the Rust language. CrabLang does not want to divide the community, but wants to help provide a new choice for people who are worried about Rust, ensuring that they have more freedom in using, creating, and promoting the language.
CarbLang emphasized that it is not opposed to Rust. The main branch of fork will continue to be synchronized with the Rust codebase The main goal of fork is to ensure that the community has an alternative that shares the same values and open source vision as its members, allowing the community to thrive without any interest factors interfering.
The development of CarbLang stems from the love of community members for this language. They will try their best to ensure that members and users retain the ability to create content, promote names or trademarks, and other assets while using it. By providing community-driven alternatives, CrabLang hopes to maintain a spirit of collaboration, innovation, and freedom. CarbLang has all the memory safety features of Rust, but it will not have a bureaucratic style.
The Rust Foundation is constantly causing trouble
However, the Rust Foundation is very disdainful of the series of actions taken by the CarbLang community. In a public interview, Ashley Williams, a member of the Rust core team, former executive director and founder of the Rust Foundation, said that forking is more like a negotiation strategy, and she believes that no one in the community is a language expert. In this case, no one will care about this organization, and they can only make some funny moves.
But soon, another farce led by the Rust Foundation slapped the arrogant leader in the face. Just last week, the organizers of RustConf2023 approached Jean Heyd Meneide, who was about to give a keynote speech at the conference, and asked him to accept it Downgraded from “keynote speech” to “regular speech” . The reason for this is that some members of the Rust Foundation leadership group were dissatisfied with Jean Heyd’s skin color and speech topic.
The disrespect towards Jean Heyd by the Rust leadership team has caused a “tsunami” in the Rust community. Faced with such authoritarian policies and racial discrimination, JT, a core contributor to the Rust project, angrily resigned from his job at Rust and wrote: “The Foundation has humiliated one of the most important experts in the field.” This sentiment has received a strong response from the community and has led many members who cannot tolerate the Foundation’s behavior to turn to CarbLang.
According to GitHub star history, after its release in April, CarbLang received 1900 + stars in a short period of time. Although growth slowed down between April and May, with the Rust Foundation’s reckless behavior again, CarbLang’s star count ushered in a new round of surge. As of now, the project has 3800 + stars , and this trend is still continuing.
Will Fork be a good choice?
In fact, there are many well-known projects in the open source community today that are forks. For example, Ubuntu, the most popular Linux publish version in the world, is a branch of Debian. Mozilla Firefox, which has the second largest client base after Chrome, was also forked from the Mozilla application suite. There are many successful cases, but there are also many projects that ultimately fail.
In short, the fork open source project has its two sides. New projects will either produce more new products with the support of members and establish their own ecosystem, or they may gradually decline and eventually disappear as the main project continues to prosper.
However, CarbLang’s fork is not intended to replace or recreate Rust. In their own words, “We are not against the original language of this project, Rust. Our main goal is to establish a community with the same values as the developers, so that people who are dissatisfied with the current state of Rust can have more choices.”
CarbLang’s goal is different from most fork projects in the past, and whether it can ultimately succeed, the choices and attitudes of developers and community members determine everything . No matter where Rust and CarbLang go in the end, this incident proves a fact that even open source foundations, so-called democracy and open governance may have problems, but the open source spirit always drives innovation time and time again.
Reference link:
https://github.com/crablang/crab
https://analyticsindiamag.com/internal-drama-unveiled-a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-rust/
