A post on the RustConf keynote fiasco

And that is EXACTLY the impression I was left with ...

The other point to make is, there seem to be a lot of people who shout "It's my RIGHT to know". No it isn't. It's your RESPONSIBILITY to look after others - and if they've had the decency to fall on their swords you let them lick their wounds in peace.

That "right to know" attitude is incredibly toxic - it leads to people getting extremely aggressively aggrieved "why didn't you tell us yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, ..." - if it's about something that only happened this morning there was nothing to tell! But usually, they're so wrapped up in their "rights" they're completely oblivious to the facts.

Cheers,
Wol

By leaving it all nameless and letting it roll, you create an organisation not unlike Terry Pratchett's Auditors of Reality. They are bureaucratic, they rule by committee, they don't dare have names, any decision is made by at least three of them, and thus any blame for their actions is dispersed into thin atoms. At the same time, dysfunctional as they are, they of course won't all step away. There's no consequences for their actions!

If you want the whole organisation to take blame, there still should be consequences it has as a whole. And those consequences should sting. Have a conference without the keynote. Pay the wronged party a cancellation fee. Something else.

Or they will never learn.

"Good king but some bad nobility" is a huge antipattern in and of itself and in the wild, it usually only exists as an excuse. You can see it in action any totalitarian country with a dear leader — the narrative goes that the dear leader is always good, it's invariably some individuals down the ladder that are bad apples. The leadership, IMO, should act swiftly if there is even a whiff of this antipattern.

This is a leadership problem too.

I agree that it would be unhelpful for, say, the mayor of a large city to say "I take personal responsibility for this one building not getting approved because of corruption in this one district's building review committee" (and especially unhelpful to say "... and so I will fall on my sword and resign"), if that mayor was unaware of the corruption.

But now the mayor is aware not just of the corruption but of the possibility that corruption can happen unchecked, which is a mayor-level concern. It would be absolutely reasonable for the mayor to say "I take personal responsibility for the fact that there was corruption in this one committee and I will put the weight of my own office in systematically making sure all of these district-level decision-making processes are fair and well-governed." This probably doesn't involve the mayor personally being the oversight at all these meetings - but it probably involves the mayor personally making sure that some form of oversight happens.

If you want a culture of improvement, it must be possible for people to learn and grow. Which means it must be possible for people to learn from their mistakes. Which means it must be possible for people to admit to mistakes and still be able to grow.

Having enough guts to come forth and admit to one’s own wrongdoing is how others can see the person can grow. It’s also a chance for them to explain why they thought their wrongdoing could have been worth it in their own words. Who knows, maybe they had a point — on a different level. Someone else will be able to think on that and make it right.

Not being involved with this project and just taking the far-away view this whole debacle, for me, reeks of the same fear that you and most in this thread seem to fear so dearly.

Here's the thing: as soon as someone takes a public role that person has involved themselves in the disgusting world of politics. This is a world where, at times, you are made to take responsibility for outcomes you did not want, for outcomes that occurred because of other's actions and for results that have exactly nothing to do with you. This is a world of backstabbing, straight out lies and manipulation. Therefore, IMO, those who could be named here signed up for such a possible eventuality, even if they didn't know it at the time. Terrible, I know, but that's a risk inherent to being in any high-level public role.

Maybe I'm just too old, but for me, a respectable person, when found in such a situation, writes an honest and factual account of the whole story and has the guts to include explicit reference to all the main players but completely devoid of any whiny self-punishment crap that reads "please don't hurt me". Then they would give a chance for the community (for some definition thereof) to decide their fate for better or worse. Better yet, all the people involved would write a joint and complete account of what happened. The way it is right now it's pretty much impossible to really get a handle on what happened because every author went to great pains to not leave any identifiable information about anyone else in their account and thus it's impossible to connect all the dots.

With all these opinions of how important it is to hide the identity of those involved I must ponder, is the rust community such a vile place that if anyone knows of any sliver of wrong doing they immediately pull out the verbal version of a 155mm howitzer with an autoloader and go bananas at everyone and anyone ? Do the leaders have such distrust for their own community that a full and factual account of a high-profile case would not be evaluated fairly ?

If anything, this episode could be seen as an argument for having all communication happen in public by default. That way, at least the partial information problem might have been avoided.

First, the act of working to improve Rust itself -- ie participating in its development, adding new language features, and so forth. This sort of work takes months-to-years to land, and to loop back to the original article, is what the dude affected by this fisasco was doing. They (and their team) had been working on a new feature for about a *year*, and as a result of this, both them and their team have not only abandoned that work, but have stepped back from any other development effort entirely.

This is why the likes of C/C++, Java, etc have slow, bureaucratic, and very formal change processes. Because as a language/platform grows, not only will everyone involved is try and pull in different directions, but some of those will be in completely mutually-incompatible ones, and there needs to be a fair & formal, public process to mediate these things.

Secondly, the act of developing large codebases in Rust. To some extent we're past this hump, but organizations and developers are _very_ conservative in the space Rust targets, and we're a long way from a critical mainstream mass -- If the stewards of Rust show they're completely dysfunctional (see also the recent trademark fiasco) it tells the PMs and VPs who make decisions about major projects that Rust is not something that is suitable to implement (and support) a project that has a planned lifecycle of longer than Rust has existed (decade+) Those projects simply cannot just "update to the current version" on a whim.

That said, some of the players starting to do real work with Rust (eg Google, Amazon, Microsoft) are known to up and fork and maintain stuff internally if it's that important. But only a fool would rely up front on that happening.

It is too much drama for this level of insult. Many members of leadership are falling on their swords and walking away, over a relatively minor slight, IMHO. See https://hackmd.io/p3VG_bK9TXOvtgh1oA2yZQ?view for Josh Triplett's account of what happened. The amount of angst and self-recrimination here (not just by Josh, but by a whole lot of people) is just too much.