So, after a full day and a lot of back and forth, a few very important things have come to light. I'll try to summarize them here because I've been posting primarily in the Bad Places® rather than the Good Places™, so that nobody's lost.
It looks like somebody from inside the Rust Project, but not with the consensus of all leadership, tried to downgrade my talk (or perhaps have it outright retracted) because they did not like the direction the compile-time work I was doing. (Learned from: https://www.jntrnr.com/why-i-left-rust/)
The decision to downgrade my talk, once it was known I was going to talk about Compile-Time Reflection in Rust, came anywhere from 4 to 8 days before I was actually told this past Friday and had to release the blog post stepping away. However, as evidenced by much of the public statements from existing, ex, and now-ex Rust Project members, the decision to unilaterally downgrade was not known to many of them until they read my post.
Downgrading the keynote was NEVER voted on like inviting me to do the keynote in the first place.
I don't know how to handle this going forward. The Rust Project has effectively ultimate commit rights to rustc and all of the projects our work would touch are under the control of the organization that did this. Even if we do the work, they could effectively unwind and undo a lot of our work, or indefinitely block it with an endless slew of "reasonable concerns" from ranking project members who seem to have problems but don't want to communicate them except by taking potshots at the status of my now-gone RustConf talk.
I don't know what to do. I'm pretty lost, it's Sunday, and I have a shitload of things I still need to do, not including this whole trainwreck.
@thephd after starting a job in corporation I found out how many patterns of similar behaviour are shared between it and open source world. With distinction that corporations actually pay you for something that can only be described as trench warfare while open source demands that you do it in free time for free. That's why I no longer participate in open source "fun".
"Rust perhaps a bit too heavily relies on (proc) macros and code generation techniques to avoid dealing with sincere deficiencies in the language, producing much heavier compile times by frontloading work at inappropriate compilation stages to offset the lack of language and library features"
no wonder lol. Writing stuff like this is easiest way to get downvoted, ridiculed and ultimately banned by rust community...
@thephd I think "peace out" is still the right approach. Whether what happened to you was the action of the org's decision or the org's negligence is irrelevant. They either collectively didn't want you there or don't have the checks in place to stop rogue people from making messes. Either way, your decision to step away was the right one, IMO.
@thephd I think this kind of behavior may lead to a real fork.
If all the people that left Rust in protest would come together, they may be half way there.
Sponsor would be hard to move, but also quite sure they would enjoy a more "drama-free" leadership
@thephd Every time i see something about Rust as an organisation I want to stay as far away as possible, it’s really unfortunate that that (what seems to be, I haven’t used it) a good language keeps getting tarnished by poor decisions from those who direct and manage both the center of community and the language specification itself.
@thephd I hope whoever tried to circumvent due process here will leave the project, for the betterment of it. I hope whoever at RustConf apparently went along with them has a good look in the mirror.
This situation sucks so much for everyone involved, and the harm (both directly to the project and in public perception) is widespread.
@barometz@thephd I am the RustConf organizer who went along with this. I absolutely have been taking a good look in the mirror after this. I fucked up by even considering this notion. I was under the impression that there was consensus among project leadership about this, and I was worried that saying no to this would have sparked different drama. It was a mistake and one I'm hoping to remedy as much as possible.
@barometz@thephd There's not much else I can say on the subject until everything is resolved, but I'm absolutely holding myself responsible for being complicit in this. It was a failure of judgement on my part, and @thephd deserved better from me as an organizer, as chair of the program committee, and as a human.
Watching from the outside, having Rust on my "hope to learn in the future" list — I really hope this gets turned around into a positive milestone of the Rust community. How situations like this are handled matters orders of magnitude more than platitudes in policies or CoCs.
So… best wishes and good luck in working this out! Really want to be looking back at this in a year and say "oh, yeah, that's when the Rust community proved its values"
@equinox I've been learning a bit of Rust, and it's awesome. I hope to do more as I make time on my schedule. In the end, I'm not that worried, because what we're observing is not so different from what we'd see in a corporate environment, the difference being that, here, it doesn't happen behind closed doors.
@sgrif@barometz@thephd all i will say is that hugs are available of consented for everyone that hurts on this. These situations are never easy for the people used by people actions.
And working to help make it better is also hard, if good, work. Big support to you for this.
@Di4na@barometz@thephd I'm sorry, but I do not deserve a pat on the head for what I'm doing now. My actions hurt @thephd, and doing what I can to repair that damage should be seen as the absolute bare minimum, not something to be applauded.
@sgrif@barometz@thephd Oh it is absolutly having an impact on the outside. I'm currently putting together the architecture of our new Content Delivery platform, and considering different parts of the stack. The look from the outside is of a project who recently have been making very bad decisions from leadership - it makes me consider what to get our team to upskill in, or to hire on, as we move away from "everything in JS".
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