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That HN discussion (and the constant feeling that "there's always Rust drama going on") could've been avoided, had everyone come forward immediately back then, but nooo it's so much more fun this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37378328

I count 3 "really icky" David Tolnay things so far:

1) being at the source of the rustconf keynote fiasco but refusing to step forward until named
2) taking serde hostage to pressure the cargo team
3) scrubbing traces of his past work at palantir (except for patents)

this sucks

There were much better ways to go about all of these. When I did the rustconf recap I was really hoping we could pull off a sensible coordinate response.

Instead we get this last-minute, backed-into-a-corner statement that's.. insulting and not an apology at all.

This sucks also because OF COURSE /now/ the attention is drawn to him specifically, b/c he refused to be part of the group response 3 months ago, when it was actually time to speak up.

So now it's a "witch hunt" and the reddit mods need to "protect the team" and blah. Bullshit.

Throughout this fiasco I've tried to calm things down by saying "this isn't a reflection of the entire project, it doesn't mean Rust is bad" etc.

But at this point I'm just no longer comfortable with the #1 Rust dependency being maintained by someone who behaves like that.

#1

The Palantir thing specifically has been haunting me.

People know about sfackler, but I was almost gaslit into forgetting what I knew because again, the only evidence online is patent filings: https://patents.justia.com/inventor/david-tolnay

Why hide? Why not disavow them publicly? It would be so easy