Rust Trademark: Argle-bargle or Foofaraw?
Please tell me you've watched Succession at least. Were you caught up on Succession or just
Speaker 2:You know?
Speaker 1:Do you have any?
Speaker 2:I watched 0 episodes of Succession.
Speaker 1:You know, we'll always have the Simpsons from the nineties. That's right.
Speaker 2:That's right. I'm clearly 20 years behind. Like, the wire was 20 years ago. I've got 20 years of TV to catch up on.
Speaker 1:But okay. So here's what I'd understand. You recommended The Wire podcast to me.
Speaker 2:Yes. Because because I'm so out of date. Because I'm so out of date. I have been watching The Wire, and the pre roll on HBO Max is listen to our 20 year old our podcast. Now that this thing that you're watching for the first time, they don't know that, is 20 years old.
Speaker 1:The podcast is outstanding. It's so good.
Speaker 2:It's so good. It's so good. It is so good.
Speaker 1:Oh my, it's exceptional. It's really, really good. I mean, I believe this when I when we watched it at the time. I'm like, I have just watched the first television that I can say unequivocally will be watched in 200 years. But like this, we will view The Wire.
Speaker 1:The Wire will be viewed the way we still read Dickens. I'm serious that it's like I mean, it's very Dickensian in many ways. Right? I mean, it's like Dickens is in many ways, like, the the the greatest analog for it. It's so outstanding, and the podcast is so good.
Speaker 1:And I have to tell you, Succession is outstanding. The Succession podcast, also very good. I I love what HBO is doing with these podcasts. I just I'll
Speaker 2:get there in 20 years. Like, no spoilers. Okay?
Speaker 1:No spoilers. Like, 2043 is right around the corner.
Speaker 3:Yeah. All right.
Speaker 1:How do we get folks up on stage here? So we got, we, I, we, we got some, you just
Speaker 2:right. Click them. Is, is Steve out here in the audience?
Speaker 1:The Ashley's there. So let's get let's get Ashley up here. Alright.
Speaker 2:Ashley, you have been invited to speak.
Speaker 3:I'm here.
Speaker 1:Alright. And and I saw Adam here. We gotta get we gotta get out of Jacob's here as well. Because Adam's gonna have some opinion on this one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I saw Adam was here too, and I was excited to be able to do our back and forth in voice.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Absolutely. No, this is, okay. This is, is a hot topic. And so just first of all, and I'm not sure if you were getting this as well, but, people were asking me to take this one on.
Speaker 1:They're like, hey. Can you talk about the rust trademark Fracas? And I'm like, is this who we are? Is this what are we like the Fracas commentators? Is this what people look to us when there is some some
Speaker 4:That's a forago? An actual question you're asking? Yes. You are a 100% that person.
Speaker 1:I you didn't get me a chance to answer your question saying, I'm afraid of the answer, Adam. I didn't wanna know the answer. And now I do know the answer, and I can't unknow. But that's who we are. Alright.
Speaker 1:Well Keep them in this. You know what? We we just need to embrace this. And I
Speaker 3:it's better you than the register.
Speaker 1:Okay. I I that is true with an asterisk. I thought that their head their headline actually, their subhead was very funny. So the Ash is making
Speaker 3:reference was great.
Speaker 1:Ashley's making reference to a register article that appeared today, describing the o the Rust Foundation having realized that maybe maybe maybe got a little aggressive on the trademark policy, and the register said that perhaps they should have wrapped the new trademark policy in unsafe. Oh.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Boom. I think
Speaker 1:that was pretty good. I thought that was and I thought the story
Speaker 3:was good.
Speaker 1:I thought that I actually thought the story was good.
Speaker 3:And What I was gonna say, I I'm kinda biased because I did take the call from them, which was kinda funny. But, the last time I spoke to this reporter was actually when there was a fork in nodes, so we got to reminisce about that. I yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I well, no. We are well, okay. So actually and that is a a pin because I do think that I I almost struggle to think of a community that hasn't had an issue that looks like this. That this is something that is very all too common, and it's like it doesn't need to be this way. I mean, I think that this this was a and I think I'm glad to see the Russ Foundation kinda backtrack here because this is an unnecessary mess.
Speaker 1:But, I mean, actually, as I was thinking about it, I mean, obviously, I so we had the, the the Node JS fork, I o dot j s. Do you remember joe.ns? Am I making that one up? I feel like there's another fork at some point somewhere.
Speaker 3:My gosh. I have not heard of that one, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:And but then also digging going back into certainly to our own history with respect to Sun, there were a bunch of these. And, actually, when the Adam, do you remember when the lawyer said that you couldn't have Java on a slide anywhere? Because do you remember this where the Java Sun did not have a trademark on Java. So you couldn't say Java because that wasn't something that Sun could defend because it's use it or lose it, and they had lost it. So they needed you to say Java technology whenever you wanted to say Java.
Speaker 1:Do you remember this era at that time?
Speaker 2:No. I was giving some presentation at Java 1, kind of submitted the slides, and then got them back with every, you know, the search and replace of Java to, like, Java technology everywhere, turning it into just gibberish. Absolutely. I remember
Speaker 1:that. Gibberish and total mistake. I made the I mean, we made the very conscious decision, to for a bunch of our core technologies to to Sun asked, like, should we trademark this? And I'm like, no. Do not want this trademarked because it's not, I don't think there's much to defend here, and I think that there's a lot of value in having this be freely available for other people to derive their and ZFS, it's do you remember the ZFS that you also can't trademark?
Speaker 1:It's a it's a 3 letter acronyms are generally very hard to trademark. And so they had a they had a different name. It wasn't a Stein. Okay. You might remember this.
Speaker 2:It was DynFS, d I n, capital d. It was not free. Capital s. No.
Speaker 1:Does that
Speaker 2:be What proof of we got this it's same dream. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Same dream. So they wanted to rename ZFS DynFS, d y n f s, not to be confused with dying f s or whatever. It's like what? So this has been a long standing issue about what we call things. And, Ashley, do you wanna just maybe walk us through what we saw happen?
Speaker 1:This I mean, the policy was announced on April 6th, I think. What was the policy, and, what was the policy kinda the trademark policy prior to this, and then why were why were so many people focused on this change in the trademark policy from the Western Foundation?
Speaker 3:This is a massive question, Brian, but sure. I'll That's a story. I would also share just for anybody who's interested in open source governance, like, you should be trolling the minutes of the foundation because they have been talking about trademark for a second. And, yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 3:There's always some really interesting little tidbits in there, and no one ever reads them. But they are they're fun to dig through after, like, a big curve level like this. So, it's worth a lot of people got really upset about this whole thing because they didn't even realize that Rust was trademarked in the first place, which is it's kinda funny, but, Mozilla has always had trademarks on their technologies and reasonably strong policies around them. The policy that existed when, I mean, we could dig into Ice Weasel, which is something that if Steve were here, maybe I should let him do. Did you don't wanna get into it?
Speaker 3:There's a lot about, like, Linux distros and things that start making what you call stuff really complicated. But the previous Rust trademark policy was mostly you can use the word Rust and the CrateZio and Cargo, which are also trademarks for anyone who's listening might not think they are. But the main thing is that you can't look like you are being officially endorsed. And and that was the the primary rule. Now there even the policy itself called out that this is incredibly subjective, and, like, people are just gonna decide and, like, maybe one day it will be and maybe one day it won't be.
Speaker 3:And so one of the biggest problems for the Rust core team as Mozilla kind of turned the tile dial down on how many people they were employing to work on Rust versus kind of kind of becoming its own thing was we didn't have any dedicated legal support. And so as a result, the community team was often receiving these questions of, like, can we use the trademark for this? Can we use the trademark for that? And it's really hard to answer given the current policy. Right.
Speaker 3:And So
Speaker 1:there was really ambiguity there in the policy, in other words. Like, there was actually there were there was a real problem to actually be solved here.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There were a couple of spots where the core team, both when I was on it and when I was not on it, flexed, the power. And one of the big ones was when they wouldn't let what is now known as Rust Fest be called RustConf. And so that was one of the biggest moves and a lot of people don't remember it because it was, like, in 2012 or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But, yeah. It it made a lot of people at the moment very, very upset and they had to, you know, come up with a different name. But, yeah, the big reason
Speaker 1:we wanted RustConf because they felt RustConf is too associated with Rust. Rustfest? I don't know. Sounds loosey goosey. I Just
Speaker 2:sounds like
Speaker 1:sounds like mayhem. I don't know. That's true. Spell that out of
Speaker 2:the script. Weird distinction. Yeah. It's Well,
Speaker 3:I mean, here's the thing that I think is really important, and I'm zooming out of your question, which was a very, very huge one, which is, like, the way it has historically been used in Rust in the past, and this is, like, a massive, like, my personal experience, opinion, perspective, parenthesis here, was the Rust project would carve out places where they wanted people to cooperate and not compete, and they would be a little spicier about the name in those spaces. And then in the other spaces where they didn't really care, they would just, like, let people do whatever they wanted. And so for reasons that I could go on and on about but aren't really that relevant, they decided that Rostkoff was a spot where, like, they they didn't wanna compete. They wanted everyone to just do that event. And if you were gonna do other events, you had to make them, like, feel significantly different.
Speaker 3:And I bring this up only because I think it's really relevant when you think about some of the folks that were working on the trademark policy and what their threat models are. Yeah. Because, you know, there's there's a lot of people doing very different interesting Rust implementations. And there are members of the project that have, like, you know, incentive to, like, dissuade people from doing that and have people do that from within the project instead of outside it. So anyways, I I personally think that trademark has a lot to do with project governance.
Speaker 3:Not everybody believes this. But, anyways, the the policy that that ended up getting shipped by the foundation, I mean, I think I think it's been litigated pretty heavily, but a small summary is that it took the you can't sound like you're officially endorsed to, like, the nth degree. I think some of the showstoppers were like, you can't have a trademark, word in your crate name. So no rust, no cargo. All cargo subcommands are would be a violation.
Speaker 1:And it felt like I can almost understand where they're coming from. It's like, well, we wanna give you, like, some guidelines of best practices. And, like, best practice would be, like, don't pick Rust. Pick RS. Like, wait a minute.
Speaker 1:What is that? Why is that a best practice? Is now every Rust crate or cargo crate now
Speaker 3:in violation of that practice has been actually listed in the Rust docs. Like, don't name your thing, like, Rust, like, for a pretty long time. But that's just because there was a desire for, like, people to use actual words on crates. Io to make crates. Io feel real because that rule came up when, like, Craytes.
Speaker 3:Io wasn't really that real and everyone was were trying to get people to use Rust. And so people people would be migrating stuff from other languages and so they would call it that thing Rust. And so to look more real, we're like, just call it that thing and use that namespace instead of making it seem like a translation. It wasn't a trademark thing when we originally came up with that rule.
Speaker 1:Right. Interesting. Well, and I think that part of the danger though is that it's also kind of your you know, I mean, I like the way you think about your threat model. But when you the it seems to be like you're using litigation as a as a potential mechanism, which feels very punitive. And I it it's gonna I mean, if the objective is to instill fear, like, it will it will work at some level, but, of course, fear has got all sorts of other negative ramifications.
Speaker 1:That's part of what we saw with the reaction to this.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. I think it's a very bad like, if what you want is to have more people work together on one thing instead of a lot of people working separately on separate things, fear is, like, not the tool I'd reach for.
Speaker 1:It's not the tool to use. No. Now that said, it's like the names of things are really important. And, Adam, I wanna get you in here because this is something that you've talked about a lot in terms of the names of open source projects and the need to have an identity and a brand. So, like, how do you balance this with something that's open source?
Speaker 1:How do you hit this balance where you kind of preserve name and identity and still have people have the freedom, in terms of the way they are able to derive things from it, name components, and so on.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, it's complicated is the short headline that no one probably needed me to say, but I I think it it depends a lot on the project and and its constituency and exactly what it needs to serve. So, like, you know, I think the answer is very different for open source companies that build an open source thing. Right? And then that thing is their also their company or also their brand.
Speaker 4:And in those cases, like, I'm I'm very much like a trademark maximalist. You know? Like, I think it's better to have a very strong trademark policy in those cases, and actually a pretty liberal copyright policy. Right? And that you want people to take the software.
Speaker 4:You want them to use it for their own ends. You want them to do those things. But you wanna ensure that the thing you produce, that is your the output of your business, you know, oxide, that that thing only comes from you. Because peep that's how people then learn to recognize that you're a producer of a product of worth and quality. I think when you start talking about
Speaker 1:are, you are pro Mobi in the Mobi Docker.
Speaker 4:Well, no. Actually, I'm anti Mobi. I think that was but but that's because I think it was bad for Docker the business, not because I'm, not for any other person. So that's weird.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:But that's about business, not about Rust. I think when you get into the, like, Rust Foundation, the the question there becomes, what is it exactly that we're stewarding? And and for whom are we stewarding it? And I think the question of quality still remains. And that, you know, if somebody wanted to build wanted to take the Rust logo and put it up next to something horrifically offensive, we wanna be able to say, don't do that.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, that that that that's not appropriate, that the community doesn't support it, that it's not a good thing for you to do. I think in the same way, you wanna be able to say that there is a Rust compiler that the Rust project builds. And that thing is what Rust is. Right?
Speaker 4:And that, like, when if you were to build another one, and you wanted to also call it Rust, but it behaved somewhat differently than the official Rust, is that thing still Rust? And it's a question it becomes the similar question of quality and of and of and of product awareness that says, hey, like, no. It really wouldn't be Rust. Right? It would be something else.
Speaker 1:It'd be it is a MariaDB. This is MySQL. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Like, you need to be able to say what that thing is and and why. And I think the previous policy, like, as an outsider who has been using Rust this whole time, but never and and, like, likes this sort of stuff, like other people like baseball, you know? Like, I enjoy watching open source dynamics and, like, thinking about it and, like, it's like, like, I like it.
Speaker 4:And I like trademark lawyers and copyright lawyers.
Speaker 1:Like, I like it. Is that just to continue your analogy? Adam, are you and I becoming the John Boy in this analogy of if you're that a
Speaker 3:With a new trailer for Deepgram.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We are we open source Jam Boy? That'll be kind of that. That that's what we do.
Speaker 2:Talk about Edge. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. What are you using there? What a John boy.
Speaker 2:So all
Speaker 4:I can think of is like, I, I like whatever the show was where they lived on Walton's mountain, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So John Boy is Brian and my favorite kind of baseball meta commentator, j o m b o y. We'll link extensively in
Speaker 1:the notes. Yeah. Which we will leave. We we will probably leave too much in the notes, frankly. If you're a baseball fan, the the and so this is actually an and Adam, this is someone who really, like, takes apart you know, he'll take apart a particular pitch or an at bat or an inning, and he'll like the and go, like, super I mean, it is truly inside baseball, and it is I'm horrible.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So if you're not that, I would like to become that. Like, I like that. I like that. I like this stuff in the way that you just described that.
Speaker 5:Right. Right. Okay.
Speaker 4:A 100%. And I think what I find fascinating about this is it feels very representative to me of what has always been true in my estimation of watching the Rust project, which is it's this sort of magical combination of people who are just sort of, like, getting it done, and, like, working out pretty good together, and sort of averse to a whole lot of, like, strong heavy handed governance. But then, like, really need governance, And so then they, like, build some, and then other people are, like, no, that was too heavy handed. And then, you know, it sort of goes back and forth in this way that I find fascinating to watch. Because on the one hand, you really like, I'm I'm so rooting for it.
Speaker 4:You know, like, you really want it to work. And then every time that it starts to get sort of the structure that it needs you know, like, the new trademark policy as a policy has a bunch of flaws. But, like, in terms of how it's written, it's delightful. Right? It uses the, like, the, like, common trademark stuff that, like, Pamela Chastiak wrote.
Speaker 4:It's like it's really
Speaker 3:The current policy is written by Pamela Chastiak. She's the one I
Speaker 4:I didn't know that she
Speaker 3:was the one. To it when I was the ED of the foundation. So And
Speaker 4:she's like and she's she's like the goods. Like, she's not, like, pretty good. She's, like, the fucking best. She's amazing. And and so, like, there's a lot of those pieces where you're, like, okay.
Speaker 4:But what you have to attach to that is you have to know what you want, and you have to know, like, what it means to your constituency to be able to do one thing or another thing. And you have to be able to express that clearly to people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And and I think how that looked to me was that they knew they needed a better trademark policy. They had it they had, like, the world's best trademark lawyer telling them like, giving them advice, which is open source trademark lawyer, by the way. She's, like, I think she's also the lead on the OSI's license committee. Like like, she's she's a baller. And, like and what a lovely person, by the way.
Speaker 4:Like, as a UNB.
Speaker 3:She's also incredibly reasonable. Don't know. I met with you a bunch
Speaker 5:of times.
Speaker 3:She's just about trying to strong-arm people into particular policies. Never. The thing
Speaker 4:I wanna say,
Speaker 3:though, and I I hate to interrupt you, Adam, but I feel like it needs to to be said Yeah. Is your characterization of the Rust project from the outside is fascinating to hear as somebody who is very deep on the inside.
Speaker 4:Oh, of course. That's why I was that's why I was so careful to label it.
Speaker 3:I'm so glad that it's, like, maintained its mirror.
Speaker 1:It's like because
Speaker 4:I know it's because I know it's a I know it's a lie. Like, I know that's not what actually happened, but, like and I've known the whole time that's not what was really happening. But it but it is what it looked like was happening most of the time. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I agree with that, by the way. Yeah. I agree with that. Sorry, Ashley.
Speaker 3:Go ahead. Depending on where you are in the project, like, I think there are people who really knew what they wanted. And then there were a lot of people who had never even reflected on the fact that we should have an opinion. And because of the fact that power in open source is basically about your ability to spend time Mhmm. The people who had already come up with the opinion that they wanted were able to push it forward in a direction that they wanted very quickly.
Speaker 3:And then That
Speaker 4:feels very real.
Speaker 1:Ash, could you repeat that? Because that is a very important observation. The power in an open source project is the ability to spend time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. People get really upset with me actually often when I express this,
Speaker 1:because
Speaker 4:Only because you're telling the truth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That is that is that's a bull's eye right there. So, yeah, expand on that a little bit. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3:So, I mean, one of the things that we talk a lot about in Rust and I had to reflect, on during my last years in Rust, I had to reflect on why I believe this to be true about open source. But my thought in open source was that part of the open part of open source was that everybody, like, could potentially contribute and could potentially contribute on, like, equal footing. And I guess I just, like, hallucinated that when I discovered open source software. This is, like, not written down anywhere. But that's, like, kind of just, like, how I believed things should work.
Speaker 3:But after working in open source for a long time, I mean, it this is not a new idea. Like, it's just a rephrasing of tyranny of structurelessness mostly. But it's the idea that if there is no, like, formal, like, hierarchy of structure, like, then the people who are spending the most time in a in a project are the people who are able to, I won't say accumulate because none of this is explicitly, like, granted power, but they are implicitly able to wield an immense amount of it.
Speaker 4:Totally.
Speaker 1:Which is not necessarily a negative. Right? That can be very, very positive. It's just that it's it is a trend to be aware of.
Speaker 4:But now let's and now let's draw the circles of what's required in order to build a good trademark policy. So in order to build a great trademark policy, you need a great open source trademark lawyer, of which there are very few in the world. So they found 1 Pamela Chesty, check. But then, you need people working on the policy who both who know how to wield lawyers in order to craft policy to serve a constituency. That is a very weird and nichey skill that tends to not show up because you could, like, program.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, we love to believe that we all understand, like, copyright law and trademark stuff. Like, I feel like I I feel like I do as well as as well as a layperson as well as most laypeople can. Like, I really have spent a lot of time in my life trying to really understand it. To the degree that now I'm, like, a fan person of Pamela Chestnut because I read her writing because I'm nerdy about how good she is at it.
Speaker 4:Right? But like, but I still can't
Speaker 1:You're a fan. You're in the arena.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, you spent 3 years of law school to figure it
Speaker 1:out. Right.
Speaker 4:I'm not, I'm not a lawyer. I didn't do the thing, but I but I'm but I'm as deep but I've made some mistakes. I've, like, got the scars. I've talked to a lot of lawyers, not just one. And, like, those people are really quite rare.
Speaker 4:And and and so when you take that, and you and you put it into even the best open source lawyer, I think it's an it's it's unsurprising that what they wound up with was a policy that went overboard on on the things they thought were really important sort of to Ashley's point. That, like, you know, if you're spending a lot of time and you already have a point of view about what should how something should be or how it should happen, and then a lawyer tells you, well, here's this structure that you could use to get to enforce that thing. Does that matter? And you're, like, yes. That's the most important thing.
Speaker 4:Write me a policy that says that, and they do. And it's ironclad. And then you show it to people, and they're like, oh, get the fuck out of here with that. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Because you don't really understand how to wield the tools at hand. You know? Like When
Speaker 1:you to your point, you've lost track of the constituency. I mean, that is a very, very important point.
Speaker 4:Or you have a particular part part of the constituency in mind.
Speaker 3:Right? Yeah. It's
Speaker 4:not just saying you lost track.
Speaker 3:1 must be is deliberate.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Sometimes it's deliberate. I'm not saying it's an accident. Like like in and this is one of the things that I in this conversation outside this room, like, Ashley is the best person to follow on this conversation because she's got so much of the inside track, and then she's also great at these topics philosophically and structurally and intellectually. And, like, because it is it's just it's so complicated.
Speaker 4:And I'm
Speaker 3:also a fan of this type of stuff, just like you are. That's why I
Speaker 4:like Totally.
Speaker 3:You know? In writing bylaws for the found the Rust Foundation was one of, like, my favorite activities.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And, like, right. This is so great. I love that shit.
Speaker 1:I like her.
Speaker 4:And, like, anyway, I I really do think that that it's it's then compounded by the way that they decided to roll it out, and the way that they communicated it, and then the way they didn't respond. Like, there's a whole other angle here that's just on, like, let's talk about crisis comms
Speaker 1:Crisis comms. Right. And how, like, oh, there's a lot here. Clarification has made it worse.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, and honestly, the fact made it worse. Oh. You know, like Oh my god. Like like the document, the actual policy document was nowhere close to as harmful as the fact was in terms of how people felt about the policy.
Speaker 4:And, like, I think the yeah. So it it some of it, I think, is and I think Steve was gonna say this. So whether he says it again or not, like, I I do think that there is a thing about there's losing track of the whole constituency. So what is the entire community that I serve? And it's really easy to wind up believing that the community you can see or the people who are in the room are the constituency.
Speaker 4:And so I'll I'll talk about this in my own experience. Like, do you remember when, everyone was very angry that people had contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement? No. Sure. So so she had a very so we had a very long standing relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, far predated people being upset about it.
Speaker 4:It doesn't right or I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just telling you that's what happened. So the, you know, when you're sitting in rooms talking about whether that policy whether we should still have that contract, one of the things that you could really see people do was they think about the constituency of the people in the room. They think about, you know, people who are your boss or who are your peers or what the impacts are sort of in your sphere. And you and you tend to then look at the policy as protection, for your point of view.
Speaker 4:So you look at it and you say, well, you know, we can't craft a policy that says that it, that we should not sell to the government. Therefore we must keep this contract, which is not true. Right. That's a crazy point of view, but it's, it's not crazy. It's the kind of thing you talk yourself into when you believe that what you're looking to are hard and fast rules that explain what's right and what's wrong.
Speaker 4:And that's not really the game we're playing most of the time. Right. We're making, we're making this we're making decisions about what we think should or shouldn't happen or why we think something is right or wrong. And so, like, to bring it back to the trademark issue, I also think that there was probably some degree of people just looking around the room and going, well, yeah, this is we all agree this is right. Therefore, the constituency has been served.
Speaker 4:Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 3:Well, I one of the things I wanna put, like, as a note on that is I think one of the things that I learned the absolutely most painful way possible is that in open source, just completely pissing off your community has a lot less ramifications than that community wants to believe.
Speaker 4:A 100%.
Speaker 3:I mean, that And I I would say, like, the the way you're phrasing the point is kind of like they've lost track of it and they should return. Like, the incentive structures for not pissing off your community in many of these foundations, like, don't really exist. And, like, when I was writing the bylaws for the Rust Foundation, one of the things I did was I, like, made a majority vote of project directors, like, be part of the voting so that the project definitely had a voice. And that's, like, unusual and unique for open source foundations. What I didn't anticipate, and now I'm kind of, like, regretting when I think about, like, how are those bylaws were set up, is I felt sure that the feedback loop between the project and the community would stay strong.
Speaker 3:And like, that is just such an obvious slippage that's happened. That's kind of come out of this experience and the incentive structures for recentering the project on the community don't really exist.
Speaker 4:Yes. And, I mean, we did this with Chef. Right? So we had an open source project. It was called Chef.
Speaker 4:Tons of people contributed to it. They never owned Chef. I owned Chef. I owned the trademark to chef. And then we used it to change our business model, and it made people very angry.
Speaker 4:And also it made us a bunch of money. You know? And I don't feel all that bad about it. And like, I feel bad that I hurt people's feelings. I feel bad I didn't set it up the way I wanted it to.
Speaker 4:But also, I still did it, and I don't regret it. I'd do it again. Interesting. And and, like, the incentives to do it, like
Speaker 3:I think that opinion, like, the way you just shared that, like, again, I was not in this room, but I'm certain that there are people that feel that way that were behind a lot of this policy.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And, like, I think in this particular instance, that's they're making a mistake. Right?
Speaker 1:I think I
Speaker 4:think I think that the the people that they're serving and what they're and and what they need from it are not aligned in the way that, like, the people Chef was serving, like, were, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think to go back to actually something you said about, like, even though there there are limited consequences to pissing off your community, I I think that depends. I I think that you there, you know, that you got the, the returning, the the the, the the bullet holes on the returning bomber kind of, image that the because there are communities I mean, it depends on what that misbehavior is. I mean, so thinking in particular about, for example, Hudson at, I mean, now which we now call Jenkins. Right?
Speaker 1:Where it's like, that actually did now the community was was happy to be completely free of that Oracle, but it's like absolutely lost the community in a way that was irredeemable. And I feel like there are things you can do. And I think it really depends on to what degree does the does the community well, the one, the community doesn't speak with one voice, but to to what degree is there Yeah.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say one thing that Florian Gilcher, who I wish was here because he's great on this topic as well, but I would share he he always gets pretty spicy if anyone says the Rust community. Go with the Rust communities. Because it is not a single voice and you always do yourself a disservice by speaking about it as if it's a single thing.
Speaker 1:Well, that's right. And I think the real question is because this is and and Steve and I we we were talking about doing this at Oxide and Friends, I was likening this to, when I was asked to give a keynote, at the Node Summit after long after Joint had decided had broken up with Node effect. This is in 2017, actually. And I'm like, no. Because I don't have nice things to say about Node.
Speaker 1:And the like, I just don't think it would be productive. And the all organized at Summit is like, oh my god. That'd be amazing. You have to now get I was like, oh my god. But it did actually that is where my software's reflection of values talk came from, because it did force me to really think about, wait a minute.
Speaker 1:What did go wrong here? And I think what went wrong in that situation was the and the reason that there was such a great fracture is because there were actually different values at work. And you've got yes. You can have you've got different communities and different constituencies. But if you don't have shared values, then the fracture can become really deep.
Speaker 1:And then I think you do end up with these these communities that kind of forever. And so I and I think that that this is I think part of what people felt This
Speaker 3:is why well, the thing I wanna say is, like, you're talking about this fracture and this is, like, when a fracture happens, like, I think it's worth kind of zooming out from this trademark policy little situation and going, what else has been happening in Rust, like, around this time that may have led to, like, a massive value split? And I do think it's worth noting that, like, a lot of leadership in Rust has either left or has transitioned to working for, like, basically a FAANG company, and that the
Speaker 1:Wait. Are are we a FAANG company in this a little more?
Speaker 3:Has changed pretty dramatically. And so, like, I think I think you can see this stuff happening. And I think one of the biggest problems and one of the biggest challenges with community management is that a lot of these changes happen on such a slow feedback cycle. It's often hard to see them happening.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And that you there's kind of an erosion that is happening that is that can be hard to see until it's too late effectively. Right. I mean,
Speaker 3:one of the things I would point out, and this was something that I was pushing for when I was still in risk governance and made everybody really spicy was, there should be a limit of, like, team membership of people who all come from individual companies or something, and that was something that Russ doesn't do. If you look at the project directors and who they're employed by, they're not independent. So it's I think it I think it's very interesting. And so when we talk about the community and what community, what set of constituencies do folks have in mind, like, while they're setting up these policies? Like, I don't I'm not trying to say it's, like, necessarily an explicit, like, evil takeover scenario, but I think you're right.
Speaker 3:Like, Adam, when you say, like, who's in the room matters because Totally. They become your feedback loop.
Speaker 4:Well, and this becomes like not all foundations are created equal. So, like, not all project leadership teams are created equal. And so when we think about, like, one of the concerns I have, and I've been said publicly, and if there are somebody in the room who's upset about it, I'm so sorry. Like, the way the Linux Foundation works as essentially a giant for profit entity that just creates baby foundations to also be for profit entities that essentially just become giant industry consortiums that serve only the consortium members as a You're among friends. Mechanism.
Speaker 4:And, like, I look at I knew where he's going. I look at those kinds of foundations, and I look at their governance, and I look at who they serve, and I think it's gross. I think it's yucky. I think I think it causes, like, you look at, like, what Cloud Native is. Right?
Speaker 4:And, like, it's the foundation building a marketing firm.
Speaker 1:Do you
Speaker 3:know what cloud native is? I still
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's whatever the CNCF says it is because the cabal decided that that's what it was best for their joint marketing efforts against Amazon. And, like, God bless them. They, they're all they're all making money. And, like, and also, you know.
Speaker 4:And and so I kind of think when I look at foundations and open source, I tend to look also at the structure of, you know, if you're one of the things like the Apache Foundation does well, they don't do everything well, but one thing they do do well is the distinction that says, like, who exactly is it that we're even allowed to serve?
Speaker 3:We're all
Speaker 4:Right? Yeah. Like like, we know like, we're very clear about who we serve, and we're very clear that they're the only people that that's the only way that we serve it. And if anything else is being served, then that's a failure of the foundation's governance of their own projects.
Speaker 3:Oh, my god. You're gonna get me so spicy right now.
Speaker 4:And, like, I think that that question of, like, well, okay, who's this thing for? Like, is it is it a programming language that is sort of weaponized for the corporate interests that need it to be weaponized in some particular way? Is it the is it is it for the people who program in it? Is it for the people the language designers who build it? Like, it's for all of those people to some degree.
Speaker 4:But in what way does does like a trademark policy, for example, be be of service to those people? And Oh. Like, I
Speaker 3:think the quote I wish the register had given me because this is, like, something I explicitly said to him. And, like, one of the things that was really important to me setting up the Rust Foundation is, like, the Rust Foundation is not this marketing flywheel that the Lenox Foundation is.
Speaker 4:Totally.
Speaker 3:It's for supporting the maintainers. And when you ask you have to ask yourself, like, how is this trademark policy supporting the maintainers? It aims And I think yeah. But I think it goes back to the fact, and this is why, like, everyone's going, like, oops, this was a mistake now, and, like, I don't necessarily disagree. But I think that there are many folks who are maintainers on the Rust project who would like to reduce the threat of competition on the language design side.
Speaker 3:And the way the language team has played with the ecosystem has been plagued with with so much conflict in Rust that I think when it came to be that the trademark policy was gonna be discussed, there was a desire to try and limit some of that, like, using this policy.
Speaker 4:That's nuts.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think it's nuts now. People are gonna be like, that's a conspiracy theory. Actually, like, you have no reason to know that. But I do know that people on the trademark working group literally troll alternate implementations on GitHub, like pretty regularly.
Speaker 3:That's all public.
Speaker 5:I've got the crazy board with all the things strung through it.
Speaker 4:If you need Oh, with the, like, with the string and everything. Yeah. I
Speaker 1:mean, look at the the
Speaker 3:whole async thing that went down in Rust. That was a massive conflict. It was extremely public, and it was all about this question, which I really think this trademark policy should be about, which is, like, what does Rust want to make official versus not? And this is something that has been a vicious debate amongst leaders in Rust for years. Like, we will literally feel it coming on and be like, we can't have the what is official conversation right now.
Speaker 3:Like Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Can you expand on the async kerfuffle, at least briefly?
Speaker 3:So when there when Rust first came out, there were no asynchronous networking primitives. And like many things in Rust, because it was missing from the language itself, there was experimentation in the ecosystem. And there was, a desire at some point to be like like, I think I was like, Node has the thing where you can write a server in 8 lines. Like, I really think if Rust wants to be, like, a server, like, network language, like, we should have this demo too. They're like, okay.
Speaker 3:Then we need async primitives in the language, and there was a lot of conflict about whether we adopt something from the ecosystem or we invent something from whole cloth from within people who were within the project governance and people who were in the ecosystem had a big old battle about it. Honestly, there's bad blood to this day. And that's why if you go, oh, which async runtime should I use in Rust? And you find like a whole bunch of different crates and some of them work with each other and some of them don't like that's why.
Speaker 1:Nice. And I the asynchronous execution also just does seem to bring out this is also I'm I'm not sure if it is but this is That's true. I don't know. What what is it about, like, this particular property of a system that is just like it like, instant civil war. Just, like, just add people, and you have instant civil war over Howard there ways sake.
Speaker 1:It's like, alright. The I do wanna someone had asked in the chat, like, hey. I'm not at the loop of the Linux Foundation. Like, what is what's going on with the Linux Foundation? So the the Linux Foundation is a 501c6 that is an effectively an industrial consortium, and a lot of us in open source think it's pretty dirty the way it operates.
Speaker 1:And in particular, it ends up being an octopus whose only job is to feed itself, and they end up, it guides a lot of their actions. In terms of who their constituency is, their constituency is their member companies, but and it's even worse than that, because they don't they they really seem to operate in kind of a very narrow self interest. So and, actually, I I think we have I'm sure there are are others to thank as well, but I think the Rust community has you to thank for, for Rust not being a quote, unquote foundation in the Linux Foundation. Because Linux Foundation likes
Speaker 4:to
Speaker 1:create these Oh, yeah. That was foundation.
Speaker 3:Here's the trick, though. So, like, one of the big things when I set up the Rust Foundation and, admittedly, in a group that didn't always agree, there was pretty much a there was a lot of agreement that we shouldn't incorporate under the Linux Foundation because of the whole, like, I the way I like to talk about the Linux Foundation is it used to advertise itself as as companies should adopt open source because the ROI is, like, a 100%, because it's free. And then they just sell advertising for that so that they can get more sponsorships to buy more marketing and advertising. And it's just a big, big event machine. But, I mean, the Rust Foundation is still a 501c6.
Speaker 3:Like, the Linux foundation has become so massive that you have to be really careful with your weirdness budget about how strange you can make your foundation because getting getting these large massive companies and their massive, very finicky legal teams to, like, agree to your terms is extremely complicated. And so And you
Speaker 1:could the Linux Foundation's problem is not that it's a c 6. The Linux Foundation's problem is that it has decided that its growth path is to grow open source foundations is its problem, I think.
Speaker 3:Well, I
Speaker 4:mean Absolutely. And to be webinars
Speaker 3:literally wanna be a monopoly. Like, they've said that. And also nonprofits can be a monopoly. There's a lot of very anyways, I could that's my little conspiracy theory that
Speaker 4:I Essentially, like, I find out if that's a conspiracy theory. I think that's very clear. I I mean, look, Jim Zemlin's not here or whatever, but if he was, he'd be like, well, yes. I I do
Speaker 3:He already knows I'm coming for him.
Speaker 4:I do believe we could just run all the foundations, and that would be excellent for my, for my for my bonus. I think, anyway, I probably should throw less shade, but I just it it's it's yucky. I think I think so much of what I what feels like is sort of around this topic of Rust's trademark problem and and those things. Like, one of the reasons that we're always going to governance and structure and and and not talking about trademark law is because so little of it is about trademark law. Like, almost almost none of it is about what you can or can't do with trademarks.
Speaker 4:And Yes. I think it especially to loop it back to my own fucking hobby horse, Like, I really do think that one of the problems is that when you start talking, it takes a while to be trained on how to talk with lawyers in ways that make you a good client to a lawyer. And, like, one of those ways is being able to say, nope. Here's what I would like to see. Talk to me about the risk on whether I can create that thing.
Speaker 4:And so and and so one thing I think probably has happened here is, like because I've heard Pamela give this speech about, like, how trademark law works and she's really good at it. And she's written she knows so much about it. But then that can lead you to believe that there's things you must do for the mark just to remain valid. And so you can you can kind of feel like you're in this, like, weird, like, trolley problem where it's like, well, I don't I don't wanna make it so nobody can have the Rust name in every crate. But if the Rust name is in a bunch of crates, then is Rust really a thing at all?
Speaker 4:Or is it Kleenex? And there's like an
Speaker 1:existential question. Use it or lose it. I mean, that that Trademark will
Speaker 4:use it or lose it. You have to do it. So I can I can totally sympathize with sitting in a room with a world class trademark lawyer who tells you what this is and goes, yeah? There's a real risk that if I wanted to sue you and say you don't really have a trademark, that I could pierce it because there's a bunch of rust crates that use dash rust. And therefore, it's a common term like kleenex.
Speaker 4:And you gotta clean that up. And so then you go, well, great. We better cut that off, you know. Gotta for the good of the project, we gotta make sure that there's no rust crates that have a thing. All very well intentioned.
Speaker 4:Not particularly conspiracy theory, you know, but also not the only way to solve that problem. Like you could solve that same problem by saying we explicitly grant that it's okay to have great names that use the word rest in it. Not because it's not a trademark, but because it is. And we said it was fine. Right.
Speaker 1:Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of ways to be really, like, creative in a legal sense, but I think it takes a really strong personality to talk with a lawyer as, like, thoughtful and present as Pamela and be, like, I hear you, but we need to do it a different way.
Speaker 4:A 100%. Because you know you're not an expert. And so you're, like, no expert. I'm we're definitely peers. Like, this is the thing that venture capital teaches you.
Speaker 4:Because at first, you're like, you go and you raise venture capital and you're like you feel like you're asking rich people for money. And then later you realize that your peers and you're like, oh, no. No. That's not how this is working at all. Like, actually It's
Speaker 3:funny you learn this from VC because I think you can also just learn this being an outsider ever.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I've I think that's real.
Speaker 5:But, like,
Speaker 4:yeah, totally. I'm just I was it just happened to be because I was thinking about all the places I learned to be peers with people that are powerful. You know?
Speaker 3:Yeah. No. That no. It's I mean, I have my own new experiences with VC, and so that
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:Made me reflect on that.
Speaker 1:I also think that When I
Speaker 3:was sitting at the foundation bylaws, I was sure our lawyer, Aaron, hated my guts. And I'm sure he wouldn't listen to this, but I think he would laugh and be like, no. It's fine. But, like, I would just be like, can we can we change this? Can we change this?
Speaker 3:Can we change this? And, like, even I was, like, wondering if I was, like, being too much, but it ended up being, like, incredibly important. But you just really have to invest in that, and you also have to want to change it. And I do wanna return to that. Like, I I don't think that the folks who were involved in this policy were necessarily, I think there were folks that were new to doing this type of thing, and then I think there were folks that were not.
Speaker 3:And they they they wanted this. And I think maybe
Speaker 1:they were
Speaker 3:They thought
Speaker 4:it was a good idea.
Speaker 3:Yeah. They were they were they were thinking that they could convince people or they were thinking that maybe people wouldn't notice.
Speaker 1:I want to play global thermal air war. Yeah. Steve, do you wanna get you I I wanna get you in here because there's someone asked in the chat.
Speaker 5:Of course. That's that's that's why you started the nuclear war is getting me involved?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. So, Steve, as part of the starting global global nuclear war, I I turned now to you, and the, yeah, I'd like to roll you out to the pad and send you the launch codes for explaining Thank you. Why does does Rust need a foundation? I I do open source projects need foundations?
Speaker 1:Why is is there a reason for them to exist beyond just, preventing kind of trademarked roles from taking over the branding?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So, like, there's definitely a lot of really good things, and, there's a good reason that this all was made in the first place. And I don't think every project needs something like this, but it said eventually as you grow, you will end up so. Like, I think all projects of a certain size eventually run into these issues. So one example is like as, was sort of said in the chat, like, it gives you a legal entity at all.
Speaker 5:Like, on some level, talking about the Rust project is, like, nonsense because that's, like, not a thing that exists in a legal context, and therefore, anything where you need to interface with something about legal stuff, like, yeah, like contracts or, like, one one great example is, like, Rust will never really, like, be able to be relicensed because we didn't have a legal entity for anyone to even sign. Like, say we've had a CLA where people would sign up their contributions and assign their copyright to something. You need a something to assign that copyright to. And so before the foundation existed, it was literally like impossible for us to do that. I'm not saying it's a thing I wanted or a thing the foundation wants to do
Speaker 1:now. Sure. But just like
Speaker 5:feature. You said you said you said thermonuclear war, so I'm putting spicy examples. But like the point is just like if you need to pay someone something, like, would you like to hire a freelancer to do something in your website? Now you're talking about contracts. Now you're talking about bank accounts.
Speaker 5:Now you're talking about money. And the only way you can really do that is if you have some sort of legal entity that is able to handle money and deal with contracts and do all that kind of stuff. And so it just it pops up in tons of places. We were the Rust Project was receiving kind of, like, in kind donations for things like CI for a really long time. And it's, like, really cool that those giant companies were, like, willing to do that, but also that stuff is harder because it's no longer the, like, you know, like, companies have ways of giving money to things.
Speaker 5:Right? And usually that's like we write a check somewhere and not like, oh, yeah. We'll, like, write off your this one account for this one thing or, like, that kind of stuff. Like, it's all just, like, more the the norm, the easy path is have a legal entity do legal stuff. And the only way that you have that is by having some sort of organization.
Speaker 5:It doesn't have to be a nonprofit, and, you know, all that other stuff. But, like, the Rust Foundation has more to do than just this trademark stuff, and a lot of those things are things that are, like, not, super sexy or things that people know about, but, like, are still are actually important.
Speaker 1:But I think Ashley raised the point in the chat that it is it is really hard for foundations to be good. I mean, it is it is tough, because the the Steve, I don't disagree with anything you said. I do think it's a tremendous feature when open source can't be relicensed, in part because it it it actually prevents a hostile takeover effectively of a project. So I think that obviously saw this when, what was open Solaris was reproprietrized by Oracle, basically. And that was effectively became it was a fork.
Speaker 1:So it yeah. You you do oh, you always have a a a recourse. I do think that you, with the foundation, though, becomes this consolidation of a of a kind of apparent power that's not actual power. And I think that, especially if you try to wield that, you will find the the the limits of that power, and you end up with a project called the crab, or one called joe.ns, or what you mean ultimately, like, you you have to guide the commute the communities with mutual trust at some level. And if a foundation violates that trust, I think it's really, really hard.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I mean, it it it actually is that way when when you're describing it's really good for a foundation to be good, is is is that what you you the kinds of things you were referring to?
Speaker 3:I mean, in some ways, yes. Like, I so one of the things that I said a lot when I was setting up the foundation and, like, I think a lot of people on the core team, once we started kind of seeing a lot of what a foundation could do for us, we were like, oh my gosh. We should've done this a really long time ago. But, also, it's, like, much better to do your foundation late than to do it too early. And I do think it has to do a lot with this.
Speaker 3:I think you have to be careful. Like you said apparent power, but the power of the foundation and the folks that work there is very real. And Yeah. Like, I can't remember that that would be take off power out of nowhere. And I think the the way foundations goes sideways is the same way, like, any company goes sideways or really any group of people.
Speaker 3:And it goes back to this idea about a divergence of values, I think, is that, like, you need to have a vision and you need to, like, communicate that and, like, rally people around it. And I think the Rust Foundation has done an absolutely shit job of that since we kicked it off. I think its idea of supporting the maintainers and, like, how are we gonna actually solve open source sustainability instead of, like, micro donations and stuff, like, that it's just gone. And I I have to be careful how loud I say this because I'm obviously incredibly biased. But one of the things that we talked about a lot is part of the Rust core team, and I think it's something that the foundation would also need to do, is that if you want to have this group, this passionate community all work together in, like, a seeking consensus decision making way, like, you have to be leading and not reacting, and you have to be leading with something that's very strong and, like, emotionally attractive.
Speaker 3:And when you drop that on the ground, like, now you're like, this is the losing of the trust. Like, I think it happens even before that where, like, if people stop following you and start going in different directions, like, herding them back together in know, like, in terms of, like, what
Speaker 1:what I mean is you need to be leading with, You know, like, in terms of, like, what what I mean is you need to be leading with the the community's broader truth. If you're trying to impose something on the community, or the communities, lead them in a direction that they, in fact, don't want to go, or only a subset of them want to go, then you're actually just going to expose this deeper value in fracture, the the the this deeper fracture values. There's a really good point in the chat made about, and just agreeing with your point, Ashley, about it is better to on the side of creating a foundation too late than too early, which I absolutely agree with.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I like the point of like, hey, this is a bit like standardization in that you want a foundation to to reflect the best practices that have grown up in a community rather than trying to impose that on a community or communities that aren't actually ready for
Speaker 3:it. Well, I guess I would push back on best practices just because in my experience of communities, like, they, like, don't have best practices. Like, they have a shared problem and, like, a shared vision of how they wanna solve it. And I think when you're leading a group of people, like reiterating what problem you're solving and how you're making meaningful change on that is, like, really, really, really important. And the fact that we relitigate, like, what is the Rust Foundation and why does it matter every time it does anything, I think fundamentally means that they've just, like, lost the, like, mind share of the vision of what they're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 3:And so, like, that that would be, like, my, like, critique of what's going on is, like, they can make any number of mistakes if, like, their purpose is obvious. Yeah. And it's a it's a purpose that people want. Like, focusing on the, like, the Rust project is way too big. We have so many things that we wanna do.
Speaker 3:We we need support for that, and we wanna support the ability for both corporate contributors, but also independent contributors to be able to, like, meaningfully participate in this. Like, once they lost the thread of, like, what is the point of this? Like, people are gonna get grumpy at almost everything. Totally.
Speaker 1:And what this is just to Adam's point about, like, hey. By the way, it's not actually about the actual trademarks. It's always there is a broader and deeper issue that is represented there. And when you've lost that, that mutual trust, then, yeah, people are gonna go into your FAQ, and they are, in this case, like, the FAQ really kinda helped them out. Any kind of conspiracy theorist was aided greatly by the fact, which was particularly, egregious with kind of exacerbating that this trust problem.
Speaker 1:Do you think, Ashley, that there that folks realize? Because I do feel like it's interesting the the the update today is much more conciliatory than we saw in the, the kind of the clarification, which was actually made things quite a bit worse. Do do do you feel that that that folks may be getting to realize that there is a a trust problem and that that maybe a different approach is warranted here?
Speaker 3:I mean, I don't know. I'm not in their heads and, like, trying to figure out exactly what's in other people's heads. It's always, like, a really dangerous game. I do think that they watched the project's message go over very poorly, and so they at least decided to do something slightly different. I continue to not be super impressed because they keep dragging along this line of it being an initial draft even though their minutes for the last 3 months have stated it as a final draft going to the board for vote.
Speaker 3:So I don't know. I'm worried. I I think I've seen both groups be extremely defensive, decide that the community response is really just, like, abusive. And, like, the person control. I personally think that there's a chance that this makes them become, like, more insular instead of more open.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And Oh, interesting.
Speaker 1:We were having
Speaker 5:It was like actively happening in the comments.
Speaker 4:Like, if you read the tone of
Speaker 5:the Reddit thread over time, like, you just see the people involved both in the project and the foundation, pull back, lump in all criticism with the don't as I sort of tweeted at one point, like, don't get me wrong, like, there is a ton of abuse in Google forms, like, when you ask people to reply with things, like, they will put all kinds of hot garbage in there, so it does not surprise me that there is, like, legitimate abuse and actual terrible Yeah. I know. I know. What I mean? Not legitimate.
Speaker 5:To be legitimately abused, not legitimate abuse. It's a little bit missing a solo there, but, like, the point is is like that though and also this perceived, like, whipping up by outsiders. Like, there's clearly a narrative forming that, like, anyone who is critical is either, like, abusive or abusive adjacent or, like, does not actually represent, like, the Rust project because they're just some popular Twitch streamer. They're not, like, a person who actually uses Rust. And that's, like, I that is my fear.
Speaker 5:I I don't actually I'm not entirely sure this will be resolved in a good way. I I think it may actually be going even worse, but we'll just have
Speaker 3:to One thing that I feel like it's worth saying because it's also coming up in the chat, and I I don't know how much insider baseball this is, whether I should be saying this quiet part out loud or not. But, like, there was when I was the original ED, I was told that the foundation wanted to go in a different direction, and the desire to hire the next ED was to specifically hire someone from outside of the project. And rest of the hiring for the foundation was very much focused on folks that had literally basically no participation, awareness of the community at all. That was something that the board did on purpose. I think it was a big mistake.
Speaker 3:I obviously am biased, but I when people are talking about we're seeing the foundation be very different than the community, I think it's also worth noting that there was probable like, there was an issue about if we hire folks from the community because there's a history there, some people like those people and some people don't like those people, and so we won't make everyone happy. And so if we hire somebody who's an outsider, then we are we won't be seen as picking sides. Yeah. But, unfortunately, that meant the shedding of a lot of context that is incredibly important for being able to communicate, in the community and communities. And so I I do think that that is one of the biggest issues, and I hope that there's seen as that there's a need for fixing that.
Speaker 3:Because I I also feel kind of terribly for the staff of that foundation who just feels like probably from the get go, everybody was mad at them all the time. I don't think they were set up to succeed and that's on the board.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That I think, especially in rust I mean, it is really to to you need to have context on it. Because I do think that, like, what I love about Rost, because I I would want to echo what Adam said, and I know that, you know, that that you and inside of this sauce delivering the delicious, delicious sausage. And you've seen horrific, horrific things required to deliver the delicious sausage. But the sausage really is quite tasty in that It's so yummy.
Speaker 1:It it is so yummy.
Speaker 3:And it There needs to be a vegan metaphor for this.
Speaker 4:It could be vegan sausage. It's still complicated to make to me even more complicated
Speaker 3:to me. It's a lot less disgusting.
Speaker 4:You gotta make fake sauce, like, like, it's legit. Or, like, it's a crab. It's not real.
Speaker 1:Right. But I I I think that the that, you know, there have been some there've been some real challenges, but I do feel that as a community, it is strongly bound by its values, its engineering values in particular. It's tech there are technical values to Rust that are really important, that are hard to appreciate as someone who's not gonna pick up the language or pick up a crate or use I'd be a part of the ecosystem or use it. I mean, it is very hard to come into it as a complete outsider. I just think it'd be hard for anybody.
Speaker 1:I think it'd be hard to for any outsider to come in. I mean, I think it's possible, but I think you've gotta be overwhelmed with curiosity and be willing to really go deep and kind of and and and live among the communities to really appreciate the what is kind of what values bind them. And I I think that is that is problematic. It it is really problematic to have a foundation that does not reflect its community because, Adam, it goes back to your initial point. It's like, who is the is the constituency?
Speaker 1:And if you yourself are not in that constituency, and this is part of the reason that I not to connect across the streams here, but as part of the reason that I I have always believed that I will regardless of my position in an organization, I will always cut code because you need it if you if you don't cut code in a software engineering organization, I think it's very easy to lose track of what software engineers are going through. And I think that it's it's very easy to lose that empathy. And I I feel that, yeah, it's really important that a foundation understand who that constituency is. And actually, obviously, the foundation is the whole thing.
Speaker 4:It's the Yeah. Right. Entire governance structure of the project. Like, the foundation is one part, but, like, we see this all the time. You're seeing it like like the Knicks community right now is having its own, like, little paroxysms of governance crisis.
Speaker 4:Right? Because there really hasn't been really much of any governance at all. And and that lack of clarity about how decisions get made means that when we do have conflict and we need to come to a resolution, there isn't really a path of resolution. What is their recourse? And I know that there is some because because they're the foundation, you know, can I think has has some checks?
Speaker 5:But There's no formal recourse for community members to
Speaker 3:Well, yeah. I was just thinking about that.
Speaker 5:Or foundation, both, just to be clear about it.
Speaker 4:There you go. So so, like, all of those things come back to governance structures. They come back to questions of, like, you know and and there's trade offs to be made. It's not like there's one correct structure. That's like, oh, obviously, what we should do is x or y.
Speaker 4:Right? Like like, you can go all the way to Debian, and it has its own crazy mess. And you can go, you know, you can have none at all, and that's its own crazy mess. And, like, it's sort of a crazy mess no matter how you choose because you've because you are building big communities that are that have lots of people who need and want whatever it is they need and want. They want jobs.
Speaker 4:They want notoriety. They want, they want whatever they want. And part of the art of community management and of governance design and of foundation design and policy and all that stuff is setting up the rules that say that, okay. We all want different things. How are we gonna make it so at the very least, the system we've set up is a fair and just one.
Speaker 4:And and, you know, that's hard to do and it like, it's, it's messy.
Speaker 2:Ashley and Steve and Adam, what do you think are the is the way out from here? Like, what what do you think happens next? Because you're describing this divergence between folks responsible for the foundation and the communities they serve? You know, is is there a way out of the wilderness?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think it depends, like, for who? Yep. Like, I mean, this isn't gonna, like, kill Rust or anything. I think that would be really silly to say. But I I mean, there's also these this idea of, like, an age of a project and the different stages.
Speaker 3:I'll also share since it's the second time happening on Oxide and Friends. We've missed dog dinner, and so if you hear the crying behind me,
Speaker 1:it is the puppy.
Speaker 3:Just pissed. But, like, when we think about Rust, like, I think Rust has to decide, like, what what it wants its constituency to be and who it's building for.
Speaker 1:Rust the foundation or rust the the project?
Speaker 3:The so in many ways, this we'd love to talk about there being this split. Right? And, sure, in in the technical governance side of things, like, there there is a split. But it it the community can understand a ton of subtlety. Right?
Speaker 3:Like, they you have to talk in kind of wide strokes. And, like, continuing to insist on, like, well, there's the Rust Foundation and its idea about Rust, and then there's the Rust project and its idea about Rust. That is not gonna be, like, a successful long term messaging campaign. They're gonna have to figure out a coherent message together, And I think that that is going to be very interesting, and I'm curious to see how it negotiates, like, the relationship between maintainers and what would otherwise be called the community, maybe end users would be the right way to talk about it. I I mean, I know this isn't gonna be the ecosystem.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I know from the minutes, they're talking about starting to adopt other projects into the foundation, which is gonna be very interesting and
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. So what would that
Speaker 4:be?
Speaker 2:What kind of projects?
Speaker 1:Because I
Speaker 3:Like a crate maybe? Like, they're gonna be make I don't know. It's it's a interesting thing. In many ways, I think it's a great idea because so many parts of the ecosystem are so critical and need support. On the other hand, picking winners, because that's what this does, is really complicated.
Speaker 4:Especially because you know the only crate that is in my mind is, like, straight to the civil war topic. I I don't know if that's the right that that's the one we're talking about, but in my head, I'm like, oh, the async crates are the obvious choice to pick a winner in. I, like, I you know, I I don't think it's necessarily the most applicable choice, but to be honest, like, they could probably do a whole lot worse than listening to Ashley. And, like, you know, if you think about what all of the complexity of what's inside here in terms of the history of the project, in terms of caring about who those people are and and and being empathetic to all of the different players and all of the complexity that exists inside their that ecosystem. Like, that is the way out of this.
Speaker 4:Right? Is to, like, put down your defenses, put down the part of you that feels that it's unjust, that you're being unfairly maligned by the people who are being shippers because there are people who are being shippers and you are being unfairly maligned by them. And also there you don't need to care about those people. You need to care more broadly about all the people who have legitimate concerns that are that are real and they're they're sharing them with you in a legitimate way. They're giving you a path to to to listen and to understand more about how to serve them.
Speaker 4:And then, you know, reiterate your point of view about the future and how it helps and like how and how to serve those people better. And like that's the way out and, you know, I've I've been watching a lot of this conversation and like, you know, Ashley's doing that very well and very articulately kinda all the time. So, you know, whether they'll do I don't think they will. Like, I think the advice to the foundation being listened to Ashley is a difficult that's probably difficult advice for them to take.
Speaker 1:But I think it's true.
Speaker 3:I don't think that's gonna happen. As I It's
Speaker 5:not because
Speaker 4:you're but it's not because you're wrong, Ashley. It's not because you're giving them the wrong advice. You're giving them the exact right advice. And
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, they they need to they can wash it through the podcast. They can wash it through, like, whatever. I'll I'll I'll, like, build a little sock puppet, and you can just put it in my ear, and I'll say whatever you tell me to say. But, like, I like, you're talking very sense of very sensical things.
Speaker 3:Well, I
Speaker 1:think that's exactly it. I think if it hurts too much to listen to Ashley, then just listen to what Ashley is saying. And Right. I Forget about who's saying it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think, Adam, it also gets again that that or that the constituency really, really matters. And I I I know it's tempting to to have that, like, that. And I've been in the rooms where you have that kinda shared feeling of grievance. But the the that and I I understand exactly where it's coming from, And I think what you're describing is exactly right. It's hard to let go of that shared feeling of grievance.
Speaker 1:But if you want to understand and be able to truly represent the community, recognize that, first of all, the trademark issue is it is symptomatic of a deeper fracture, not necessarily hopefully, not around values, although maybe that too, but but certainly around trust and constituency. And you the you it's now incumbent to really figure out how do you represent that constituency and win that trust back. And just listen to the sock puppet that Adam has over here that has that happens to look a lot like Ashley. That is just No.
Speaker 4:I'll make it I'll make I'll make it look nothing like Ashley, and then we'll do like, I'll call her up or whatever, and she'll just tell me what to say, you know, and I'll just be, like, it'll be great.
Speaker 3:I I really feel like I need to state that, like, I don't think a lot of what I'm saying is particularly, like, unique. No. I don't think
Speaker 4:But it is articulate and deeply informed by the truth.
Speaker 3:But, like, I I think one of the things that the project has struggled with, and if you take a look at some of the inside Rust blog posts about how governance is currently being reformed, I think one of the things that leads me to feel concerned about the reform that they are doing is that they really have not been creating space at the project level for people who are good at this type of communication and who care about this type of work. I'll be honest, like, I got really excited about this type of work and I spent a lot of time doing it, and I spent a lot less time, like, standing up infra for crates. Io. And then I was told I was kind of, like, irrelevant and didn't really contribute to the project. And so, unfortunately, like, the you don't code, so you don't count, like, in many ways strikes again.
Speaker 3:And the Rust project is not likely to listen to me at all, but I do think one of the things that they should try and figure out is how they can get their bench a little stronger on certain skills that were clearly lacking in this situation, and I hope that they are able to work on that.
Speaker 1:With the bench stronger, then you gotta listen to the bench too. I think that the other because I and I have gotta say I'm certainly wondering it in this case, is you can have a small number of personalities that can win a room. And there are folks who are like, you know, I actually wasn't totally comfortable with what we were doing, but there's kind of a consensus to move along with it. It's like, well, you you're actually you're in the room to represent that point of view. And even if that's gonna create some uncomfortable lack of consensus, it's like you gotta listen to that bench.
Speaker 3:Well, I would I would be really careful with that, and this is, like, a whole another chat, Brian. But, like, Rust's ability to handle internal conflict, especially what has happened over the last couple years, has had a massive chilling effect on people's, like, ability to engage in negative ways. And I personally will say that many of the folks who were that dissenting voice, after some of the things that have gone down, like, chose to leave the project, then stay and be the dissenting voice. And that's a big culture problem inside Rust governance right now.
Speaker 1:And that is a big challenge. That is a big challenge. When you when people are because those those folks will walk out of the room. They'll be like, alright. Forget it.
Speaker 1:I and but the problem is now you're losing that voice that ends up being a really important voice that, by the way, would have talked you out of potentially would represented a descending voice when you're on the cusp of making kind of a a a a policy on goal here with respect to the trademark policy.
Speaker 3:I think a lot of those voices absolutely walked out of the room, and you can look at the Rust blog and see who left. And it's a real bummer, and, like, I get it, and, like, but figuring out how to have constructive conflict inside a project is incredibly important if the goal is to have, like, open governance and decision making.
Speaker 1:Totally. And I think that constructive conflict becomes only possible when you do actually have shared values. I still believe that Rust does have shared values because, our certainly, I they again, to our earlier point about it kinda being magical from the outside, the, I have had less I I find more and more frequently that things are happening in the community that are delightful than things that are are so I think there's a there's a lot of great stuff to build on here, and that that we I I think there's reason to not have fracture, but it's gotta be really looked after deliberately. And you've gotta actually, as I say, build that bench, get those descending voices back in the room, and listen to them.
Speaker 4:It doesn't feel like a permanent fracture problem to me at all. Like, if this becomes a permanent fracture, it's because there was something so much deeper that people couldn't see or understand. Do you
Speaker 1:know? Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It feels it feels it feels bonkers to me that, like, if you're actually looking at this particular issue, especially assuming that it gets any a few steps better toward resolution. Like, turning this into any kind of permanent fracture feels like it would just be you would have to work really hard to make that happen and, and and perhaps be a really bad actor intentionally.
Speaker 3:Oh, I think, Adam, just, I guess, maybe to clarify, and, Brian, you can tell me if this is right or not. But I think at least what I was trying to express is I think this trademark policy, like, kerfuffle, is, like, a symptom.
Speaker 4:Totally.
Speaker 3:Not, like, the original cause. And I think that it will find a resolution, mostly because it it can it it is a pretty straightforward thing. Like, it is not uncharted territory, to write an okay open source trademark policy.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Whether it heals the other things that are that are looming, that were symptomatic, that helped this become a thing that we now have to talk about, you know, is is a different question.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But those are the things that need healing. Just to your point, Adam. So I I think that there are reason for optimism, but the but we there's work to be done, for sure. And I think that it's, this is and I think maybe it's always see, again, I'm just thinking about the number of open source communities that have had these these trademark, fractures based fractures.
Speaker 1:And maybe the lesson from this is like, hey, by the way, it's never about the trademark. It's always about deeper sense of of of loss of trust, loss of agency, loss of constituency that is is that if you ever think if you as an open source think you're having a trademark issue, it it's not about the cap on the toothpaste. There's something deeper going on.
Speaker 4:That feels real.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's spot on, Brian.
Speaker 1:Well, this has been, extraordinary. The the I I mean, it I obviously think so highly of the 3 of you. I mean, you too, Adam. But, you know, the the the the, but I I mean, I think that the the 3 of you are real leaders on this subject. I think that that people really look to you for and you've been in a bunch of different communities.
Speaker 1:You've seen some shit as, as Steve, as you'd say. I mean, we've and I think that the the real strength of Rust historically has been pulling that wisdom from other communities. And I just, can't thank you enough for joining us today. This has been a terrific discussion.
Speaker 3:Well, I was gonna say, Brian, just just for us nerds though, like, can we have another call where we actually talk about trademark?
Speaker 1:Oh, you may
Speaker 3:I wanna go to this call with Adam. Yeah. I feel I
Speaker 4:feel really bad about it because, yeah, I'm I'm like a full on trademark maximalist.
Speaker 3:Like Yeah. I'm I I don't know where I'm at, and I wanna have a conversation with someone about it. So Yeah.
Speaker 4:No. I have a very strong point of view that I think a lot of what's wrong in the way that we're building open source companies today hinges on the fact that we've over rotated on using copyright to try to create competitive distinction to the detriment of our own communities and instead and we do that because we misunderstand the ways we can apply trademarks in order to create the differentiation we want and the communities that we desire in a way that's fair and just. And I think we've been fucking it up for a super long time. So, yeah, I'm I'm down to I'm down to stand on that soapbox any day.
Speaker 2:Great teaser for a sequel for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think we got into a sequel, and, maybe get some real real trademark lawyers here to join us as well. But, yeah, let's do a sequel next time.
Speaker 4:Oh, get Kyle in here in Spicy Land. Pamela will do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Pamela would do the what what let's get Pamela here and
Speaker 3:Oh, Lewis would probably do it too.
Speaker 4:Oh, totally he would.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm sure that he would join if he's not too busy with all his AI stuff now.
Speaker 1:Well, let's do it. A sequel would be awesome, and I I I love it. We'll we'll go deep and we'll, we'll we will be the John Boy for open source communities.
Speaker 2:Right on.
Speaker 1:Apparently, that way, it means something to you and me, Adam.
Speaker 3:Well, I was gonna say, someone earlier in the chat said the Matt Stoller for open source, and I kind of liked that too. I don't know if folks read him. Maybe that's just me. I don't know. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We will we'll go deep regardless. Alright. Well, everyone, thank you again so much, and, we'll we'll look for us to tee up a sequel sometime soon. And, thanks again for for joining us today.
Speaker 1:Thanks, everybody.
Speaker 4:Bye. Thanks. Bye.
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