I think this is more of a reflection of mainstream OSS culture in general. Rust development currently is heavily tied to proprietary services (e.g. GitHub required for contributions, issues, crates.io login, CI, etc., Discord and Slack communities rather than Matrix, Zulip) and likes to license things under MIT. I think the lack of awareness/care for the big picture of fighting for software freedom is simply not there just as it is missing from mainstream OSS culture. Because convenience and network effect are king.
You do have a point but in case you are saddened by this phenomena, let me just point out that we live in a VERY different age compared to when GNU coreutils were born. Nowadays you only get a few minutes -- or hours if you are lucky -- to answer a ton of fundamental questions like "where do we host code?" and "how do we communicate on this project?" or "how do we do CI/CD?" etc.
The people in the past had all the time in the world to tinker and invent. Maybe I am mistaken though, past is usually looked through rose-tinted glasses right?
But the fact remains: nowadays answering the above questions is beyond my pay grade: in fact it's beyond anyone's pay grade. Services like GitHub are deemed a commodity and questioning that status quo is a career danger.
I really do wish we start over on most of the items you enumerated. But I am not paid to do it. In fact I am paid to quickly select tools and never invent any -- except when they solve a pressing business need and are specific enough for the organization; in that case it's not only okay but a requirement.
Beyond anything else however, we practically have no choice. If I don't host a new company project on GitHub I'll eventually be fired and replaced with somebody who will.
I would also onto your point and say that one reason why Rust is easy to get into is because of the convenience that these semi-proprietary platforms provide.
We here on HN have both the time and ability to set up things like CLI Git, and Matrix. But for a new language, forcing people onto esoteric (& superior) platforms makes them less likely to use them.
It would be nice if Matrix and self-hosted Git were the default, but when acquiring users/programmers is your goal, Rust doesn't have that luxury.
Agreed. Maybe they will tighten things up in the future but when you are after adoption and getting as much help as you can, it's indeed a luxury to be morally idealistic.
Rust uses Github, but could easily switch to a self-hosted platform if Microsoft became opposed to Rust's goals; (and yes, Microsoft is a Rust sponsor, but not an essential one). Cargo has support for alternate registries built in.
Some of community is on Reddit and Discord, but most technical discussion takes place on Discourse and Zulip. The official "user questions" forum is a Discourse instance.
Most subcommunities forming around Rust projects use Zulip instances.
The Rust community uses proprietary services when convenient, but it's hardly dependent on them.
Disagree, just look at bors and the use of Azure CI. It would be a huge PIA to switch.
> hardly dependent on them
I wouldn't say hardly, I think it's more like kinda. GitHub's network effect is pretty strong. Compare the number of contributors to golang for example which is hosted on Google code.
