Mozilla also played a big part in this foundation being necessary after it laid off most of its employees involved in Rust last year. The foundation is a good idea of course, but they could have handled it better, e.g. setting up the foundation first, so that the Rust developers could transition to it without the disturbance and bad PR generated by the layoffs? It's not that Mozilla is so cash-strapped that it had to get rid of them immediately (at least not as far as I know)? Or was this the kind of drastic action some parents have to take in order to get their kids to finally move out?
> setting up the foundation first, so that the Rust developers could transition to it
I don't think the Foundation ever plans to employ so many people to work on the language. Most of the people who left Mozilla now continue to work on Rust at Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. By no means am I defending Mozilla here, just saying that the Foundation wasn't the solution to employ 10+ engineers working full time on the language.
Yeah, of course a Big Tech company would rather employ a developer and allow them to contribute to Rust (and influence its development in the direction of the company they work for) than donate money to the foundation so that it can pay developers. Silly me...
Those companies are also donating to the Foundation in cash and kind (AWS and Azure hosting).
The developers who have newly joined these companies have years of contributing to the Rust project. I'm 1000% confident that they wouldn't land anything that wouldn't be welcome by all users. For example, one engineer at Amazon is working on making it easier for Amazon engineers to learn the language by improving the error messages. Those improved error messages benefit everyone.
This also exists in the broader context of tremendous growth in CEO pay over recent decades. There are widespread claims that executive pay is inflated. In one sentence:
> Importantly, rising CEO pay does not reflect rising value of skills, but rather CEOs’ use of their power to set their own pay.
In that context, it's absurd, to put it mildly, that she said this quote in her Jan 2020 layoffs letter:
> You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen. Our 2019 plan underestimated how long it would take to build and ship new, revenue-generating products. Given that, and all we learned in 2019 about the pace of innovation, we decided to take a more conservative approach to projecting our revenue for 2020. We also agreed to a principle of living within our means, of not spending more than we earn for the foreseeable future.
[NOTE: per the link in the parent comment, "Mozilla's 2019 expenses came to $495.3 million, or almost $5 million more than revenue."]
> This approach is prudent certainly, but challenging practically. In our case, it required difficult decisions with painful results. Regular annual pay increases, bonuses and other costs which increase from year-to-year as well as a continuing need to maintain a separate, substantial innovation fund, meant that we had to look for considerable savings across Mozilla as part of our 2020 planning and budgeting process. This process ultimately led us to the decision to reduce our workforce.
Yeah, (re)reading that reinforces my opinion that Rust is better off being supported by a foundation - provided of course that the foundation is better managed than Mozilla...
