Please stop making stance or non-professional statement in release announcement and Rust official channels

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(A note for anyone who viewed this post but is reluctant to leave a message here: You feel what I felt when I saw the non-technical part of the Release Announcement)

Before anyone gets offended by the title somehow, please allow me to make my point clear:

  • I'm NOT asking anyone to shut up.
  • I'm nicely asking anyone who wants to express their stance about NON-professional subjects to express their opinions somewhere else with their own personal identity on non-professional platforms.
  • By "non-professional", I mean anything that is NOT related to technical problems, issues and theories. Just to clarify again, "professional" here I mean "technical".
  • Not making stance here (in release announcement) means nothing else but "this issue is non-professional". It does NOT mean ignorance or cruelty of any kind.
  • Release announcement of Rust is a professional channel. Let's do professional things only and professionally in professional channels.

I've been thinking about the announcement of Rust 1.59 these days. As more and more open source groups get involved in the non-professional issue of recent weeks, I'm getting more and more worried about the technical profession of Rust about how such a statement will affect the Rust community.

The key point of my opinion is "Asking Professionals to Stand with Something is New Harassment". Before anyone somehow gets annoyed by this sentence, please imagine these two scenarios (not analogies but metaphors at the risk of trivialization):

  1. One day, you go to your office and report recent progress on your project to your boss. "We have made quite a few updates, the progress looks good!" you say. Your boss: "Good! My wife is getting divorce with me, she's really ungrateful. You are on my side right?"
  2. You are going to take a math class. Your professor says: "Today we are going to learn solving a linear system. But before that, I want you to know I stand with cats (or anything)".

If you feel uncomfortable (or even harassed, like I do) in these two scenarios, then you understand my bold sentence above. In such scenarios, you have the right to say nothing as a professional and saying nothing means only "this is non-professional". Of course, you can say anything after professional events (like the meeting and the lecture above) as an individual, not a professional. Professionals standing with something non-professional is just like saying mathematicians (physicists, ....) like cats.

A specific example is this VueJS PR, and I think we should do the same in Rust official channels, which is just "Be professional and nothing else".

update: Besides urging for exclusion from non-professional issues as professionally as possible, personally, I take a similar opinion to RalfJung's.

update on my thoughts: If the community really hope Rust, as an organization, to take stance on some non-technical issues, we should get everyone in the community involved in the decision making of taking a stance and publish the statement in a non-technical (but official) channel.

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Just for context: this is not new.

This is a shorter blog post than usual: in acknowledgement that taking a stand against the police brutality currently happening in the US and the world at large is more important than sharing tech knowledge, we decided to significantly scale back the amount of promotion we're doing for this release.

The Rust Core Team believes that tech is and always will be political, and we encourage everyone take the time today to learn about racial inequality and support the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Russian military forces are invading Ukraine. There’s even instances of multiple kinds war crimes happening. Our world isn’t the same as it was a week ago anymore.

I’m very much against starting any kind of discussion on the level you’re trying to approach this issue from. By talking exclusively about being “professional” and about “harassment” or making up some IMO very inappropriate “not analogies”-analogies (I don’t understand how one can seriously bring up having an opinion on cats in this context as a point of comparison), you’re not doing justice to the topic.

To bring up a specific counter-example of an organization that released a statement on “the unlawful Russian military invasion of Ukraine”, well… github.com itself is releasing a statement and shows (at least for me) a ”notification” (or whatever you’d call this) on my GitHub home page:

Screenshot_20220304_180144

Given this precedent, I would’ve been quite worried about the potential effects on the Rust community if there wasn’t any official statement from Rust on this topic.

I am aware of the fact that China has severely limited freedom of press in general, and as far as I know currently pro-Ukrainian or anti-Russian opinions are not allowed in the media. I’m unfortunately not really able to imagine what it’s like living in such an environment, and I can emphasize with your feelings when – unlike where I live – perhaps release messages of open-source projects are among the only place where such a clear picture of support for Ukraine and criticism of the Russian government is expressed. I could also understand if for you personally, taking no personal stance on the issue might be the only viable issue due to your circumstances. Feel free to ignore the relevant section in the Rust 1.59 release announcements if you want to; I’m sorry if the clash between common (public) opinions in the west and common (public) opinions where you’re from causes you slight discomfort, I hope you are well off personally and your level of discomfort stays negligible compared to the problems that the people of Ukraine face these days.

One final note about the PR you linked to, the discussion contains a comment that states “the Ukrainian government has made a choice and must bear the corresponding price” (i.e. blaming Ukraine for this invasion) and has more than 20 likes. I hope we won’t get to this level of support for misinformation in the Rust community.

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Yeah, I know. It is professionally unfortunate. And I took no sides on this professionally. Personally, I won't discuss my stance here.

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Personally, you don't know if I am from China. Professionally, I don't have any comments on that and it's not relevant.

I do have my personal stance but professionally I will not take either side. What I urge for is that keep professionals professional and don't ask them to stand for anything that is non-professional. No one would ask math equations to make stances, so why do people think they should ask professionals to make non-professional stances?

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Well, it was an educated guess. Also the PR thread you linked features multiple comments of people from mainland China. My main point was that if you’re from a country without good freedom of press and such things, then I can understand you feelings. If you are from a free country then I’m strongly opposed to your opinion and not willing to tolerate the way you’re trying to distract from the horrible things happening to Ukraine right now with this thread.

I’m not even sure who asked you to pick a side, so what’s the problem? Also you somehow managed to use the word “professional” 27 times in 3 posts, and 3 times alone in this short sentence.

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Because professionals are people, and because "not taking a stance" is a stance. I would argue that one of the most unethical things the computer industry routinely does, is pretend that it's possible to leave politics out of anything.

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I sympathize with the desire to keep official communique purely technical, but just a word of advice: @HuaguoShan I recommend skipping the metaphors/analogies. I think they're distracting from your point and could potentially be offensive to some who may feel issues are being trivialized.

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I know (so I say I'm not asking people to shut up), but people should urge their stances for themselves, which mean they should not take advantage of professional power because professional power is for professional use and professional power means nothing when it goes beyond its professional field.

Personally, yes. Professionally, saying nothing just means "it's not my profession" and should not have any subjective meaning.

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Please refrain from such "educated guesses". Trying to infer based on a presumed nationality is a large reach, and risks violating CoC (discriminating based on nationality)

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Good point. But I think people need something to ground their sympathy, so I make a warning.

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Political issues are often issues of humanity. Any issue that hurts humanity hurts our progress as a global community. This is why politics are not explicitly called out in the CoC

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I understand the sympathy here, but I think this will inevitably lead to arguments of "whataboutism". What about this and what about that, which leads to a mud of arguments. That is one of the reasons why people want professional attitude in their working environment.

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I hope we continue to make non-professional statements in release announcements and other channels. My involvement with Rust is not professional on any level and I think a lot of people are interested in Rust for non-professional reasons, or for use cases across many different professions and other fields of endeavor.

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Demanding people conform to this certain interpretation of professionalism is essentially an attempt to take control of Rust away from its community, by alienating the technology from the values of the people that built it. It kind of looks like a inconsiderate blunder or whatever but at a deeper level it's really kind of cynical and sinister.

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Another issue is definition of professionalism. Having taken an International Business class, my critical take away is that you can't define professionalism globally.

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That is one of the reasons why people want professional attitude in their working environment.

If 'professional attitude' means pretending technology exists in a bubble isolated from anything else, then I do not want that to be my working environment. My working environment is not code, but people. Many of which are personally affected by the current events. Let's not take away the humanity element from Rust.

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FWIW I broadly speaking agree with the OP (despite the inappropriate metaphors). I fully agree with and endorse the message in the release announcement, and yet I am uncomfortable with seeing it inside a release announcement. (I felt the same for Rust 1.44, back then with the added concern that it felt very US-centric.)

My discomfort comes from two sources:

  • I am carefully dosing my consumption of news these days since everything is so crazy and horrible that I am easily triggered. Having news pop up in places that I expect to be entirely technical certainly doesn't help with this.
  • We have no decision process for what "the Rust community" considers important enough political issues to take a stance on, and which stance to take. As far as I can tell, this is effectively decided by some individuals (and I don't even know which ones). And we're not (primarily) a political activism group so it wouldn't even make a lot of sense to have such a process. Admittedly, Rust is openly political in some aspects, but geopolitics is not one of them so I don't think that argument applies here.

Part of the fun of working on Rust is not thinking about how bad the world is for a while. :slight_smile:

If the Rust community absolutely wants to take a stance here (which seems to be the case if I am reading the room correctly here), I think it would be more appropriate to do that in a dedicated announcement than as part of technical communication.

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Personally, I don't take this accusation. Professionally, it is not my message here.

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I vote in favor of continuing to take a clear stance in the release announcements.

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