A community fork of Rust
Recently the news broke that a fork of the popular Rust programming language was born, which has the name CrabLang and that it is worth mentioning that they do not intend to divide the community and will not develop a separate branch of their own in parallel.
The project occurs as a synchronized branch which provides a workaround based on the original Rust codebase, which is still considered a reference.
The Crab (or "CrabLang") community fork was created as a light-hearted but measured response to growing concerns within the community about the influence of corporations and the foundation's proposed restrictive trademark policy. This was not a “knock” reaction, nor was it an attempt to spread fear or cause panic. While the document the foundation wrote led to the fork, we believe it is an overdue fix for an issue that already existed and addresses some issues that many members of the community have been having for some time.
The development of a fork of the Rust language and the Cargo package manager (the fork is supplied under the name Crabgo) will be led by Travis A. Wagner. The reasons of the fork are cited as dissatisfaction with the growing influence of corporations on the Rust language and the Rust Foundation's questionable branding policy.
the bifurcation will periodically migrate Rust language and package manager changes, after which Crab versions will be formed that are identical in functionality to the Rust versions, but do not impose any restrictions on developers inherent in the Rust project.
Crab's main goal is to provide the community with an alternative that is consistent with your values and do not impose restrictions on use for corporate interests. Crab is expected to be of interest to those who want more freedom in using the language, creating products based on it, and promoting these products without fear of trademark infringement. The project will be community driven. and will try to maintain the spirit of collaboration, innovation and creative freedom.
We want to emphasize that we are not at odds with the project or with the original language. We appreciate all you do to improve the language, and the main branch of our fork will continue to be up to date with the original codebase. Our primary goal is to ensure that the community has an alternative that aligns with their values and desire for unrestricted use.
The Crab community fork is driven by our love of a language named after a type of mushroom.
Without further ado, it is worth mentioning that we have to wait for how this Rust "fork" develops, which I personally see as unnecessary, but it may become relevant, although as I personally mentioned, I do not see a future for it, since it seems that it will have the same fate as Glimpse, a fork that after so many years of a dispute over the name of GIMP simply went into oblivion.
Last but not least, it is also worth mentioning that talking about Rust, a few days before the fork was created, a conflict occurred in the community of Rust in which the project member JT left the project.
The reason was the transfer of JeanHeyd Meneide, who was invited to the RustConf 2023 conference, from main conference status to regular, after which JeanHeyd refused to speak at the conference. JeanHeyd Meneide is one of the editors of C Standard and an activist. JeanHeyd is promoting the inclusion of compile-time reflection support in Rust, which she planned to dedicate her talk to.
The reason for JT's departure from the Core Team was the actions of two important members from the community who ignored the decisions made by the steering committee. In particular, the Rust Steering Committee and the RustConf organizers overwhelmingly approved the recommendation that JeanHeyd speak in the main section. Some time later, after JeanHeyd was notified of the decision and agreed to speak, two non-voting members of the group disagreed with the blanket decision due to concerns about the enforcement of Rust's reflection support promotion, whose implementation is at a very difficult time.
The Body acknowledged that the incident was caused by problems in the project management organization, apologized to JeanHeyd and the community, and began working to modernize the decision rules and processes.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.