"Rust People" Are a Threat to BSD Too (the Licence Isn't the Main Issue, Nor is the Proprietary Microsoft Hosting)
I've had and I've put forth my fair share of criticism of Rust, both as a "community" (I don't view Rust as a real community) and as a technical project.
Sami Tikkanen has just published a long article about Rust. I have some of my own thoughts about Rust.
Tikkanen's article finished with: "It should be noted that the Rust language is being developed by the Mozilla Foundation, which is the same organization that is presently turning Firefox into a spyware monster that sends all data about its users somewhere to train "AI"."
What is Mozilla anyway? Let's go back several years when Aral Balkan wrote:
Mozilla: donate your voice to us so we can build an open source dataset!https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en
Me: so will Big Tech companies like Google – which gives you half a billion dollars every year and which you owe your existence to – be able to use it?
Mozilla: Yes, we’re licensing it under CC0 for that purpose.
Me: You could license it under ShareAlike and avoid that…
Mozilla: What? Who?
Me: You’re not really what you say you are, are you?
Mozilla: ssh, don’t rock the boat!
He later wrote:
Mozilla is the “socially acceptable” face of Big Tech.For example, Google and friends know you’d never “donate your voice” for whatever their next privacy eroding product is. So thank goodness they don’t have to ask you. Because an entity they invest ~ half a billion dollars into every year and which you trust (maybe it’s time to review that choice?) can ask you instead.
So Mozilla creates a voice dataset and licenses it liberally so any surveillance capitalist like Google, etc., can use it.
Rust was marketed to us similarly by Google and Microsoft. It was "meant" to be some "social" alternative to "unruly" C, even if Rust relied a lot on antisocial proprietary software and presented several technical and legal challenges (pitfalls).
If Golang (Google Language) could not take over the world, then maybe Google can sponsor Mozilla (i.e. the usual) to make some pseudo-community that shames critics using straw man arguments, then censors anyone wishing to participate who does not trust Microsoft and Google.
In the past I was open-minded about Rust, but things turned sour when I started receiving E-mails from people shunned by Rust for very innocuous speech or views (not even remotely right-wing). It started to seem like Rust was fronting for some peculiar agenda and then the US government started smearing C, and that's hardly an endorsement or a badge of honour for Rust. It's not like the US government is genuinely interested in real security - au contraire.
The write (or rewrite) everything as Rust mindset isn't just a problem for GNU or the GPL. It'll turn out to be a problem for the BSD types too. BSDs aren't written in Rust, so BSD developers should buckle up; they too will become "a target" if they grow immensely popular (like Linux in Android). █