The main development team of the Rust programming language (Rust Core Team) and Mozilla announced their intention to establish an independent nonprofit organization, the Rust Foundation, by the end of the year, which will take over the intellectual property associated with the Rust project, including trademarks and domain names related to Rust, Cargo, and crates.io. The organization will also be responsible for organizing the funding of the project.
It is worth noting that Rust was originally developed as a project within
Mozilla Research, which in 2015 was transformed into an independent project with management separate from Mozilla. Although Rust has since developed autonomously, financial and legal support was provided by Mozilla. Now these operations will be transferred to the new organization specifically created to oversee Rust. This organization can be viewed as a neutral platform, independent of Mozilla, which will simplify the process of attracting new companies to support Rust and enhance the project's viability.
The trademarks of Rust and Cargo, prior to the transfer to the new organization, are under strict usage policies enforced by Mozilla, which creates certain restrictions on package delivery in distributions. Specifically, Mozilla's trademark usage conditions prohibit retaining the project's name if modifications or patches are applied. Distributions may only distribute packages under the names of Rust and Cargo if they are built from original source texts; otherwise, prior written permission from the Rust Core Team or a name change is required. This stipulation hinders timely independent error and vulnerability fixes in packages with Rust and Cargo without coordinating changes with upstream. The announcement also mentioned that
the termination 250 employees at Mozilla were affected, including those actively involved in Rust development. It has been reported that many of the Rust community leaders who worked at Mozilla developed Rust in their spare time rather than as part of their job duties. The Rust project has long been independent from Mozilla, and Mozilla employees who were part of the Rust development teams will continue to be members of those teams even if they are laid off. However, there are no guarantees that laid-off employees will be able to continue dedicating time to Rust at their new jobs.
Source: opennet.ru
