Comment by ameliaquining
3 hours ago
See the official project issue on this: https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326
TL;DR: They want to fix this, it's a lot of work that no one's being paid to do, there's a roadmap with specific tasks that need doing, volunteer contributions are welcome.
> it's a lot of work that no one's being paid to do,
aren't they like some kind of non-profit (in the legal sense) that is still able to take a lot of money (from players like Google and Co, to justify fixing this), as opposed to ... say the Zig foundation, ... that is is also "non-profit" but can't get money the same way?
The non-profit (the Foundation) pays for specific things but it is not really there to hire people to work on things. It pays for infrastructure work and to pay the existing maintainers who often do review work. It also gives stipends to up-and-coming contributors for Open Source outreach programmes, but this are not really the people who you want to have immediately work on your critical infrastructure code.
Just going to say it out loud :) Its been known for 10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
10 years ago, GitHub had a far better reputation and the Rust ecosystem was much smaller and less load-bearing, so "what if someone doesn't have a GitHub account" was a theoretical concern for most people. So the issue was a low-priority backlog item that everyone agreed would be nice-to-have but there weren't enough people willing to volunteer their time to it over more important and more impactful work.
Obviously, the situation has changed in recent years, so it's now considered a much higher priority by many people and some of them are actively working on it. But it's a lot of work to be done by volunteers, so it takes time.
That's the reality of open-source projects: things get done when they are important enough to motivate someone to either fund it or work on in their free time, not according to idyllic roadmaps and schedules.
The reason people were sounding the alarm 10 years ago is because if you tie yourself to a proprietary platform then you're at its mercy, even if it changes for the worse for everyone which is what we're seeing now.
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Pro tip: Using "load-bearing" is heavily associated with LLM usage :)
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Wow, have you forgotten? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
10 (edit: 8) years ago MS took over Github. The writing was on the wall then...
No need to explain OSS to me, I maintain and contribute.
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Counterargument: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...