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That HN discussion (and the constant feeling that "there's always Rust drama going on") could've been avoided, had everyone come forward immediately back then, but nooo it's so much more fun this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37378328
Why did dtolnay's gist get removed from /r/rust? Did the mod team there learn nothing? https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/169hqck/dtolnay_responds_re_rustconf/
I count 3 "really icky" David Tolnay things so far:
1) being at the source of the rustconf keynote fiasco but refusing to step forward until named
2) taking serde hostage to pressure the cargo team
3) scrubbing traces of his past work at palantir (except for patents)
this sucks
There were much better ways to go about all of these. When I did the rustconf recap I was really hoping we could pull off a sensible coordinate response.
Instead we get this last-minute, backed-into-a-corner statement that's.. insulting and not an apology at all.
This sucks also because OF COURSE /now/ the attention is drawn to him specifically, b/c he refused to be part of the group response 3 months ago, when it was actually time to speak up.
So now it's a "witch hunt" and the reddit mods need to "protect the team" and blah. Bullshit.
Throughout this fiasco I've tried to calm things down by saying "this isn't a reflection of the entire project, it doesn't mean Rust is bad" etc.
But at this point I'm just no longer comfortable with the #1 Rust dependency being maintained by someone who behaves like that.
The Palantir thing specifically has been haunting me.
People know about sfackler, but I was almost gaslit into forgetting what I knew because again, the only evidence online is patent filings: https://patents.justia.com/inventor/david-tolnay
Why hide? Why not disavow them publicly? It would be so easy
Anyway. I sat on that info knowing it would eventually come out, and I was REALLY hoping it would come from them. Nobody's being thrown to the wolves here, it's just bad decisions, and not taking responsibility for one's own actions.
And it was all avoidable. Such a waste.
Again, I was willing to weather accusations of "cowardice" or "being part of the conspiracy" because I've been "person having to make their first public apology & who just needs a little push" before and I think everyone should get that chance.
Clearly that wasn't the case here.
still think forking the language was a waste of time, however… I don’t understand why there isn’t a large community-run subreddit by now. Can’t discuss anything on the official one these days…
@fasterthanlime serde is genuinely so important to the ecosystem that it needs to be slurped up by the broader organization at this point. this particular series of events just shows what will happen eventually if one person is in control of any particularly important bit of infrastructure all on their own. this is a "bus test" situation so to speak.
@fasterthanlime David Tolnay called every single one of your bluffs that something would be done.
And if it wasn't for @whitequark and the one other person I know?
He was absolutely right about it.
@thephd @whitequark I’m pissed about the outcome and still would do it the exact same. Their failure is not on me: outing them back then would’ve done the same damage to the project they just did right now.
@fasterthanlime @thephd @whitequark who gives a fuck about "the project" when people are being harmed?
@dysfun @fasterthanlime @thephd @whitequark ThePhD was harmed directly, but damaging the project also harms (albeit less so) all the other people who put their work, effort and soul into it. The first kind of damage was already done at the time when Amos could have outed dtolnay. For the second kind of damage, there was still hope that dtolnay would take responsibility by himself.
@fasterthanlime @thephd @whitequark eh... i'm not sure about that.
If Tolnay were capable of being honest & candid in a timely way, then no one would have needed to out him.
But since he *wasn't* capable of being honest & candid in a timely way, the project was already damaged regardless of whether anyone outside the project knew it, and the only way to avoid *future* damage is to remove him from the project (which couldn't be done before he was outed).
@fasterthanlime @thephd @whitequark ...But the fact that no project member was willing to out someone like that might actually be the worst part of all of this.
Because why should we assume that's not a pattern, even after Tolnay is gone.
@thephd @fasterthanlime @whitequark What really astounds me about all of this is all the people shocked that it could possibly have been dtolnay. Anyone who knew a little bit about how he acted should have predicted it. I called it on the first day the original story broke. The only reason I couldn't say anything is I literally had no proof.
@fasterthanlime my opinion on this is the following https://mastodon.social/@Alonely0/111008738453759943
@Alonely0 @fasterthanlime i'm only passively following the whole discussion, but i don't think there's much to "resign" from...i don't think he's in any of the official teams (like say, burntsushi is in the rust-lang regex team), it's literally just a popular crate that he, and some people, made...that happens to be used by literally everyone
a fork also won't fix that because there's been years of "just use serde" and all of those crates and their dependencies would have to be updated
@fasterthanlime I tink removing the most upvoted posts from yesterday and replacing them with a read-only view to dtonlay's reply *with all comments locked* is deeply concerning.
It's the same move they pulled off during the keynote fiasco, where a mod deleted all the comments on one thread, execpt this time they knew better and were more subtle about it so redditors catching up on the issue wouldn't find out?
@fasterthanlime I mean, it is starting to feel like a degoes protocol may be needed with a certain individual...
@fasterthanlime taking responsibility means accepting wrongdoing. yeah, i can infer a lot about those making these decisions... thanks for trying since the start to keep the hope for a better outcome going.
@fasterthanlime zero tolerance for working with someone who is fine with palantir. for me if you do and them regret it, I need an explicit public apology to trust. I’m sure I’ve worked with folks who did & I just didn’t know about their dubious ethics but this detail of this mess has me very turned off Rust which has been my #1 new lang fun thing in years. :/
@fasterthanlime so. you're talking about this in past tense. is his current relationship to Palantir known?
@fasterthanlime I checked today and I'm actually relying on at least 14 repositories that he maintains 