Mozilla and Rust Core Team Will Create a Non-Profit Organization
August 19, Rust Core Team and Mozilla, who develop Mozilla’s programming language “Rust”, announced that they will create a new foundation. In response to Mozilla’s layoffs, they want to secure a way to maintain the stability of the Rust project.
Rust is a programming language project that was started by Mozilla Research in 2010. Rust is used by Amazon’s Firecracker, Fastly’s Lucet and many other projects.
According to Rust Core Team, with the launch of Rust 1.0 in 2015, Rust established its project direction and governance independent of Mozilla. They began investigating the idea of founding an independent Rust Foundation since 2019, but what accelerated their action to officially create the foundation was Mozilla’s announcement on August 11 to restructure the company. Among Mozilla’s layoffs of 250 people, there are active members of the Rust project and community. As there are some concerns that this restructuring plan is producing some uncertainties against Rust, they need to quickly establish this foundation.
Due to the fact that Rust has many contributors outside of Mozilla as well as Mozilla’s in-house developers who use their free time to contribute, they say that the project is less likely to be hugely impacted by Mozilla’s restructuring plan.
The new foundation will handle the management of trademarks and domain names associated with Rust, Cargo, and crates.io. Rust Core Team has selected members to form a project group driving the efforts to form the foundation.