Mozilla-independent Rust Foundation Announced

Rust Core Team and Mozilla announced the about the intention to create an independent non-profit organization Rust Foundation before the end of the year, which will be transferred to the intellectual property associated with the Rust project, including trademarks and domain names associated with Rust, Cargo and crates.io. The organization will also be responsible for arranging the financing of the project.

Recall that Rust was originally developed as a divisional project
Mozilla Research, which in 2015 was transformed into an independent project with independent management from Mozilla. Although Rust has been developing autonomously since then, financial and legal support was provided by Mozilla. Now these operations will be transferred to a new organization specifically created to curate Rust. This organization can be considered as a neutral platform, not associated with Mozilla, which will make it easier to attract new companies to support Rust and increase the viability of the project.

Trademarks Rust and Cargo prior to transfer to new entity belong to Mozilla, and fairly strict rules apply to them. restrictions for use, which creates certain difficulties with the delivery of packages in distributions. In particular, Mozilla's trademark terms forbid retaining the project name in the event of changes or patches being applied. Distributors may only distribute a package under the name Rust and Cargo if it is built from the original sources, otherwise it requires prior written permission from the Rust Core Team or a name change. This feature prevents the rapid self-fixing of errors and vulnerabilities in packages with Rust and Cargo without coordinating changes with upstream.

The ad also mentions that Dismissal The 250 employees of Mozilla also touched people actively involved in the development of Rust. It is reported that many of the leaders of the Rust community who worked at Mozilla participated in the development of Rust in their spare time, and not as part of their job duties. The Rust project has not been tied to Mozilla for a long time, and Mozilla employees who were part of the Rust development teams will continue to be members of these teams even if they are fired. At the same time, there is no guarantee that the laid-off employees will be able to continue to devote time to Rust at the new place of work.

Source: opennet.ru