So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ?
I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. This post is obviously from an engineer, but i fear the day business people will start looking into ways to leverage the contribution Amazon made to Rust.
To be very clear, it's not Amazon's language to take. We are contributing (and I think you'll see us increase our contributions), but we are one of many contributors.
And, I should add, the real contributors are the engineers who do the code. AWS is committing credits/cash/other, but when it comes to the engineering, we are hiring committers so that they have time/resources to continue to do so. But it's those engineers (and engineers from other companies) who are doing the work.
I'm very, very grateful that Facebook and others have also been hiring Rust committers. It's better as a community, not as one company's programming language, even a great company/org like Mozilla.
So, no, don't worry about AWS taking over Rust. We couldn't and don't want to. Rust has done so, so much right as a community-led project: welcoming, inclusive, kind. We hope to contribute to that, not commandeer anything.
Not really. The post is by Matt Asay who's title is Head of Open Source Strategy and Marketing. The post reads like an attempt at improving upon the negative image AWS has garnered in open source by making money on open source projects without paying, or sometimes without even crediting, the authors. Most recent examples include Headless Recorder[1] and before that Kafka, Elasticsearch etc.
Totally fair to critique me as a marketer (though that's not really what I do. The only time I've had a true marketing title was when I ran marketing at MongoDB), but I don't think some of the other criticism sticks. We've been contributing to Apache Lucene and Solr (which feed into Elasticsearch), as well as Elasticsearch, for a long time. See, eg, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/amazon-giving-back-a....
As for Headless Recorder, we're working with Tim now. That was a miss on our part, one that I (and the team involved) regret. But I don't regret you and others calling us out when you feel we've done wrong. AWS is not a perfect company, but I've been gratified that people here (in my experience) want to do the right thing. Sometimes we need help figuring out what's right in a given situation (or, rather, what's the right way to help customers. Increasingly you'll see teams understanding that more upstream contributions might be the best way to help customers in the medium- and long-term, even when it's not necessarily the obvious way to help them in the short-term). So please keep helping us do better.
> So, Apple got swift, Google got Dart and Go, i guess Amazon is trying to "have" rust ?
No? Project sponsorship, either direct or by hiring prominent contributors, have a long history in OSS support and have little to do with "owning" languages.
Did Google or Dropbox take ownership of Python when they hired GvR?
> I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust.
What are you talking about? It's literally not their decision to make.
Imagine Amazon keep hiring all the main contributors of the language and mainstream libraries, then decide to fork the language to add their own custom flavor, under their own conditions.
We're still very far from that point, but i've seen worst things happened in the history of big megacorps.
I don't think that's what's going on here. Swift and Go were both projects that Apple and Google respectively dedicated a lot of engineering resources to growing into mainstream popularity. AWS would have to spend a decade stewarding Rust the same way to get the same "halo effect".
I hope Amazon will keep the open source nature of Rust. This post is obviously from an engineer, but i fear the day business people will start looking into ways to leverage the contribution Amazon made to Rust.