Are you sure? Seems like Rust is owned by Mozilla Corporation (others like Firefox are owned by the foundation).
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The Mozilla Corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation. In any event this is rather in the weeds.
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@Centril I believe setting up a foundation in Iran or China will be better compared to US, US for me is one of the worse country to be chosen IMHO since they like to sanction other countries, what if other countries are sanctioned and not able to use Rust? Any other countries that do not sanction other countries can do better, less restrictions.
But setting a foundation really requires money? Money is troublesome. What if there are no monetary involved when setting up (not maintaining) the foundation? By the way, is it possible to set up a foundation across countries rather than just sticking to a country, same like Rust having a dual-license to reduce the restrictions, can that apply to setting up a foundation?
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What can sanctions impact? crates.io only. Possibly also github/irlo/zulip.
Otherwise US is fine. US copyright/trademark ownership are fine.
Seems moving crates.io to more neutral grounds is the main motivation to want a EU legal entity.
Iran was probably a joke right? It will likely impose/have imposed its own sanctions 
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I fully agree, Germany or Canada would be better choices. No country whose government is weighing whether to install an internet kill switch should be considered (speaking as an American). Not to mention, US telecom companies have already demonstrated their willingness to hand over private information to the government, no warrant needed. Germany has admirable data privacy laws, some of the best in the world. Ireland and Denmark could also be possibilities.
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Hi everyone. I'd like to gently steer the conversation here. I don't think it's productive to review the policies of individual countries or area or discuss geopolitics.
What I am somewhat interested in is getting a concrete idea of the ways that jurisdiction can affect potential contributors to the project, given the limited goals that I outlined for the foundation.
As @mbrubeck noted, the copyright and crates.io are currently housed in the US, so a US-based foundation doesn't seem like it would change anything in that regard. One obvious impact I can see would be that it might affect who can donate to the foundation and it might affect the tax implications thereof. Similarly it would affect who might receive funding for the foundation. But if the foundation has a relatively narrow scope, that might not be that important.
Beyond affecting who can give or receive money, what other impact might jurisdiction have?
Personally, I am most concerned that we continue to enable people to participate in the Rust project through engagement -- i.e,. by contributing patches, taking part in design discussions, helping to run meetings or discussing roadmaps -- than I am about enabling them to give money.
I would also note that questions of jurisdiction are part of the reason that I think a narrow scope for a foundation makes sense. For things that fall outside that scope, such as hiring developers, a patchwork of trade associations might help to sidestep this question entirely -- there might be some located in various parts of the EU, and some located in the US, and perhaps some elsewhere.
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As noted above, the most meaningful distinction, setting money aside, is the amount of energy needed to maintain the organization itself.
So perhaps the most useful question would be "Why not join an umbrella project like the Software Freedom Conservancy?" Or at least contact them for advice?
They will have heard the question before and also likely know legal experts who can tell you the answer.
As noted earlier in the thread, we are absolutely evaluating existing foundations.
Speaking only for myself, I have a strong preference that we join an existing foundation rather than creating a new one.
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With these layoffs, now is the time.
I think many developers have had fears that Rust couldn't do without Mozilla support, and while many people working on Rust don't work at Mozilla, the blow will be the biggest the project had since the beginning.
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Hi everyone, we made a short statement about the layoffs yesterday. A blog post will be coming soon!
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In case you didn't see it some other way, the blog post is here: Laying the foundation for Rust's future =)
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Are members from the project team going to comment on why a new foundation is going to be created instead of just saving yourself a lot of paperwork and joining an existing open source software foundation?
That decision has not yet been made.
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Thanks for the clarification! I thought it had, based on the blog:
You mean something like Apache, or am I misunderstanding?
There are many foundations that serve as umbrella organizations for Open Source projects. We've been talking about several potential homes, in addition to creating our own.
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