Item — HN Reader

Thank you, Steve. You have personally done more to make the Rust community what it is today than possibly any other person. It speaks very poorly of Mozilla that they don't value your work.

Perhaps 2019 is the time to start the Rust Foundation, as mentioned by boats and others[0]. If so, you'd clearly be one of the founders. I would put my name into the ring for that as well, as we're now in somewhat similar circumstances. All it needs is some money, a lot for a pizza cook perhaps but a pittance by Silicon Valley standards.

Wherever our paths lead, I hope they continue to intersect!

[0]: https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/rust-2019/

2 comments

I am really of two minds about a foundation. I've seen a few different variations of this idea, and they all have a lot of downsides, as well as upsides. It's not clear to me that it would be a win.

I'm with you. It would have to be well-run and not toxic, which is not the default in open-source, sadly. Perhaps I'm thinking about the world the way I want it to be, rather than the way it is.

I'm genuinely interested, could you expand a bit on what the downsides / upsides would be?

The pros and cons are both related to a thing that many people don't think about when it comes to non-profits: money. A foundation's job is to administer money. The pros are that well, someone has to do that work. Collectivizing helps; a random person giving $10 once isn't worth the management overhead, but 10,000 people giving $10 (or whatever) means you have a more substantial chunk of money. Additionally, projects also need things like legal support, which a foundation is well-set up to manage.

The cons are, well, that work is hard, and you can also end up in a position where you spend as much time fundraising as you do actually improving the project. This is why people talk about "efficiency" in non-profits, ideally these tasks take as little money as possible to do the administration, and spend as much as possible on the project. Also, when you're in the business of distributing money, you have to manage people's reactions to how you spend it, some people are going to be upset that you picked project A over project B, or person A over person B. That's also a form of overhead.

(and I'm not talking about MoFo here, I know very little about it or how it works. This is based on experiences with other non-profits and foundations that I've experienced and/or heard about elsewhere, and from lots of other people.)

Ah, I see what you mean.

Thanks a lot for the explanation, I've never really understood how foundations work.

IMO if no Rust Foundation already exists, it should. I don't chip in for much of anything, but I would chip in for this [1]. Of course, whatever I donate would be peanuts compared to corporate donors. Corporate donors might be fewer for now, but once GOOG/AAPL/FB/GE/GM/etc realize Rust's potential they should/would fork over big money to keep Rust going.

Steve, it's not my business to tell you what your career should be, and TBH I have no idea what your relationship is with the rest of the Rust dev team. But maybe you would be good at creating a Rust Foundation?

[1] -- it would have to be a real US 501c3 or global equivalent, not a kickstarter/gofundme.