While I appreciate the direct link that bypasses the email form, here's the page describing the report and its author:

http://www.oreilly.com/programming/free/why-rust.csp

"One of the original designers of the Subversion version control system, [Jim Blandy is] a committer to the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, and has been a maintainer of GNU Emacs, GNU Guile, and GDB."