foundation-faq-2020

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When selecting where to base the foundation it was noted that no matter where was selected, it may be the case that some people would find it hard to contribute as a result. Given that limitation, in the long term (I'm thinking potentially a number of years from now), would there be room for secondary/associated foundations elsewhere in the world to reopen any discovered-to-be-closed avenues of contribution?

So before I answer the question about the potential multiple foundations, I want to clarify the original point made about tradeoffs with incorporation location because I think what we said was confusing. While it’s true that there are any number of tradeoffs to incorporation in any location in the world, there are no current or anticipated impedances to contribution to the Rust project for any set of entities. Rust’s original steward, Mozilla, was also incorporated in the U.S., so the transfer of intellectual property and trademark to a 501c6 in the U.S. doesn’t materially change anything. The lack of impedance to global contribution is derived from the completely open and public development and design of the Rust project, but to get more in depth on this would veer dangerously close to legal analysis, which I want to avoid because I am not a lawyer. While not definitive, and not necessarily representative of the Foundation’s perspective, this post by GitHub is a good introduction to the topic for folks that are interested.

So onto the question of a future with multiple foundations: There is certainly nothing preventing a future where there are a plurality of Rust Foundations, though, at least for the moment I, personally, see more cost than benefit. It is worth considering the challenges it could bring to fundraising were there to be more than one place to donate; I think it'd be unfortunate to have multiple Foundations competing with each other for funding. Additionally, every new individual foundation would have operational overhead, which would divert money from Foundation causes. Then there is the potential overhead of having to coordinate efforts across multiple Foundations, or, if we were to fail to coordinate, the overhead of managing the lack of consensus . In my head it’s a classic distributed systems vs monolith tradeoff. I don’t know what the future will hold, but I can say that the Core Team definitely discussed this possibility, and we agreed that if it were to be something folks decided was the right call, it would need to be done thoughtfully, and likely be several years in the future (as you also noted in your question 😄 ).

Thank you for that thorough response.