as an excuse to not have to have the ethical discussion (yet)
I think you’ll find, if you look closely, that the people who have major ethical concerns about LLM usage are a vocal minority and that many projects and communities won’t be having that discussion because they don’t believe a problem worth discussing actually exists.
I’ve been digging quite a bit into how different major projects and communities have come to the conclusions they’ve come to so far and there are very stark differences there. There also seems to be a pretty interesting split with respect to whether project leadership themselves have any interest in hearing or engaging with the perspectives of non-contributors.
That’s the really interesting part for me, to be honest: how clustered it is. It comes as no surprise to me that the Rust community has that big of a response to it. I say this neutrally: from an outsider that has used a number of different languages and ecosystems, the Rust community seems markedly different in their mixing of software development and social causes. Rust is a cool but small pocket in the overall software development landscape.
I’ve also looked at the minutes from some significant open source foundations’ board meetings on the topic that looked about 15 minutes long. Often one board member would raise some kind of concern (environmental, provenance, etc) and not argue too hard for it. Policy agreed to (most popular: humans take responsibility of the code, don’t submit vibecode or machine-authored PRs). Done.
And some did have quite thoughtful discussions that ultimately went one way or another. I don’t have numbers for active developers for a bunch of different languages and projects. I’d be happy to see good numbers either way.
I say this neutrally: from an outsider that has used a number of different languages and ecosystems, the Rust community seems markedly different in their mixing of software development and social causes.
To understand your message better, what makes Rust “markedly different” here, specifically?
I don’t mean it in any kind of derogatory way if that’s what you’re asking. The community itself is quite new compared to, say, the C++ community and baked a lot of values and governance into the project very early on. The fact that they do surveys like https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/03/02/2025-State-Of-Rust-Survey-results/ and explicitly include metrics on different marginalized groups speaks to the fact that their objective isn’t just “make a memory-safe programming language” but to include community, inclusivity, and ethics into the core of the organization.
Other large projects are starting to do that too, but it’s usually more of a bolt-on / slow shift affair rather than having baked those values into the core from the beginning.
I think you’ll find, if you look closely, that the people who have major ethical concerns about LLM usage are a vocal minority and that many projects and communities won’t be having that discussion because they don’t believe a problem worth discussing actually exists.
I’ve been digging quite a bit into how different major projects and communities have come to the conclusions they’ve come to so far and there are very stark differences there. There also seems to be a pretty interesting split with respect to whether project leadership themselves have any interest in hearing or engaging with the perspectives of non-contributors.
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What’s your basis for thinking people with ethical concerns are a vocal minority? As one data point, when Rust project members were solicited for feedback, around half of them brought up ethical and environmental concerns.
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That’s the really interesting part for me, to be honest: how clustered it is. It comes as no surprise to me that the Rust community has that big of a response to it. I say this neutrally: from an outsider that has used a number of different languages and ecosystems, the Rust community seems markedly different in their mixing of software development and social causes. Rust is a cool but small pocket in the overall software development landscape.
I’ve also looked at the minutes from some significant open source foundations’ board meetings on the topic that looked about 15 minutes long. Often one board member would raise some kind of concern (environmental, provenance, etc) and not argue too hard for it. Policy agreed to (most popular: humans take responsibility of the code, don’t submit vibecode or machine-authored PRs). Done.
And some did have quite thoughtful discussions that ultimately went one way or another. I don’t have numbers for active developers for a bunch of different languages and projects. I’d be happy to see good numbers either way.
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To understand your message better, what makes Rust “markedly different” here, specifically?
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I don’t mean it in any kind of derogatory way if that’s what you’re asking. The community itself is quite new compared to, say, the C++ community and baked a lot of values and governance into the project very early on. The fact that they do surveys like https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/03/02/2025-State-Of-Rust-Survey-results/ and explicitly include metrics on different marginalized groups speaks to the fact that their objective isn’t just “make a memory-safe programming language” but to include community, inclusivity, and ethics into the core of the organization.
Other large projects are starting to do that too, but it’s usually more of a bolt-on / slow shift affair rather than having baked those values into the core from the beginning.
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