The Rust review team resigned collectively "overnight"! The topic of open source community governance is hotly discussed again

On the morning of November 22, the review team of the Rust programming language suddenly announced their collective resignation, which took effect immediately. They submitted the resignation statement through a pull request on GitHub (the page is currently locked).

Subsequently, the incident quickly ignited heated discussions among overseas programmers, developers and the entire open source circle.

The review team member Andrew Gallant wrote in his resignation statement that the reason for the team’s resignation was "in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves" situation).

According to information on Rust related pages, the review team is mainly responsible for "maintaining the code of conduct and community standards", but according to the content of the resignation, they cannot do this, and the core team seems to exceed these boundaries.

Gallant stated in his resignation, "Due to this structural irresponsibility, we are unable to implement the Rust Code of Conduct in accordance with the expectations of the community and the standards that we adhere to." Subsequently, he put forward 4 specific suggestions on how to move forward to the Rust community:

1. The first is responsibility. Gallant wrote that the Rust community should "reach a consensus on the core team's monitoring procedures," and he stated that this process is currently "only responsible for itself."

2. The outgoing team recommends "Replace the review team by Rust team members instead of core team members".

3. The future team "under the suggestion of the Rust team members, take the initiative to decide how to best deal with and discover unhealthy conflicts between the Rust team members", and it is also recommended to conduct "professional mediation".

4. Finally, the new team should “try as much as possible to pay special attention to maintaining the healthy size and diversity of the team”, which Gallant did not do.

Despite these suggestions, it can be seen from the "review team" page that Rust has urgently appointed a temporary team (if not a permanent replacement), and Khionu Sybiern and Joshua Gould have been listed as the new temporary team. member. Among them, Gould is already a member of the Rust community team.

At present, the page has listed the former team members as classmates, and attached a message to thank "all past members for their valuable contributions!"

The team members wrote at the end of their resignation letter, “We avoided expressing specific dissatisfaction under irresponsible circumstances” because they chose to “maintain caution and confidentiality”. But the Rust community and its replacements are "extremely skeptical of any statement made by the core team (or its members)."

Finally, the team members stated that they are willing to contact the Rust team members for "suggestions or clarifications." And at the end of this letter and the letter, people have to guess that the community should do this.

The topic of "open source community governance" triggered by the resignation of the Rust team

Regarding the collective resignation of the Rust review team, although it seemed that nothing major happened on Twitter, many Rustacean (the name of the Rust developer) were very curious about what happened.

Andrew Gallant's last tweet seems to be related to a scuffle around Rust, the core team, and Amazon in early September. In this scuffle, an article on Infoworld triggered a series of events.

According to thenewstack citing the report, the article was later edited and commented: "The previous version of the article correctly pointed out that the Rustacean principle is an imitation of the Amazon principle, but it may inadvertently imply that Amazon is responsible for the development of Rust. Amazon is responsible for the development of Rust. Several Rust maintainers and contributors are hired, but it is only one of many companies with employees." Of course, these two things may also be completely unrelated.

In the updated content of the above report, an r/Rust moderator detailing a pinned comment posted on the post was later edited, saying that this was not the case: "In order to answer whether this question is related to an incident that occurred earlier this year, @ Steve Klabnik is worried about the Rust Foundation’s pursuit of executive directors and Amazon’s influence on the Rust Foundation. We can conclude that this has nothing to do with this incident: the core team is a department independent of the Rust Foundation. The Rust Foundation has chosen since then An executive director, core team and solid team seem to have nothing to do with Amazon."

Mara Bos, head of the Rust library team, holds the opposite view for the above view. She thinks @Steve Klabnik's point of view is "complete nonsense". Andrew Gallant's two recent tweets reproduced Mara Bos' views.

Although there are no more details about the incident, on the morning of November 23, Matthieu M., a former member of the Rust audit team, just released a separate RedDIT thread/R/RISE, where he reported to the new CEO of the Rust Foundation. Rebecca Rumbul and three new members of the core team JT, Jan Erik Rediger and Ryan Levick apologized.

Matthieu M. wrote: "Our relationship with the core team has been deteriorating for months, and our resignation should never be taken as a condemnation of your nomination. I wish you all the best."

In response to the above further comments on the resignation of the moderate team, Chef co-founder Adam Jacob expressed his views on the topic on Twitter, "Although he has no inside information about this situation, the Rust community has actually created it."

In addition to the clash of views above, more on Twitter about the open source governance issues caused by the incident have again been paid attention to and discussed in the industry.

The popular programming language Rust: "Ideal and Reality"

As early as 2016, Stack Overflow's annual developer survey ranked Rust as the "most popular" programming language. In 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, developers once again voted to express their love for Rust.

In fact, as early as the creation of the Rust community, the "Rustacean Principles" principle was used to balance the sometimes competing development priorities, such as some characteristics summarized by the developers:

• Reliable: if it can compile, it will work.
• Performance: The idiomatic code runs efficiently.
• Supportive: Language, tools, and community are here to help.
• Effective: A lot of work can be accomplished with a little effort.
• Transparency: Predictable and control low-level details.
• Versatile: You can do anything with Rust.

We have seen that the Rust programming language has never been so "glamorous" and completely new. Because of this, the industry speculates that this obsession with Rust will continue around 2022.

Niko Matsakis, the co-leader of the Rust programming language project, Shane Miller, Chairman of the Rust Foundation, and other key members of the Rust community have also been working to ensure that Rust will be loved by people in the coming years and even decades.

Although the Rustacean principle is regarded as the motto of Rust, when bright ideals meet cruel reality, ideals may be discarded at will, but in fact it is precisely these ideals that have made Rust's long-term development and become popular among developers. Programming language.

This incident has once again made us deeply aware that between ideal and reality, teamwork is always the most important thing, and too many conflicts for the technical team are not only a kind of "internal friction", but also regret.

We will continue to pay attention to more about the next step of the event. If you have any views on the event, please leave a message in the comment area for interaction.