I;m sure some will read this as me supporting Palantir, because that's how the Internet works, but I don't and find them unpalatable.
The same goes for travel costs. It seems a delicate issue: do you fund people who are deeply involved in the project and have shown a continued effort, or new members who might drop next week? To the author, the answer seems so obvious, to me it isn't.
My memory is hazy at this point, but my recollection of the original grievance was that there was a (funded?) Palantir employee on the Rust team at the same time that they decided to put out a message in support of racial justice. The former certainly doesn't help the message of the latter, and people were (in my book, understandably) upset at the dichotomy.
My own work is partially funded with defense money, because the DoD funds everything. I'm not so happy with that, but I do think that working at Palantir requires several additional steps of introspective moral failure than merely receiving DoD money does.
That's a highly partisan opinion.
C++ is used to write literal missiles that kill civilians in the middle east, but you don't see the leaders of the C++ community who work for big surveillance / big military / big tech also LARP as American communists on Twitter while working for CIA operations (although, if I have understood it correctly, black lives do matter to the CIA, it's the brown ones they have issues with).
What I see here is evidence of a team that simply isn't experienced with running a serious organization and/or has personal issues around communication skills and personal organizational skills. That's not "toxic" but it is a serious scaling issue. In companies this usually necessitates bringing in someone in a senior executive role who is good at these things and empowering them to take over some of those functions.
Toxic to me implies actual covert or overt hostility.
The author of the post complaining about not maintaining a list of alumni is listed on that page.
Context (in order):
1.) https://archive.fo/f10KK 2.) https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/announcement-ashley-willia... 3.) https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/914 and https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack/issues/928 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515306 4.) https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea... and https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671
To make it clear: it is not a copy paste, I collected them from my memory and history.
> It feels more like circumstantial guilt than anything else, given the lack of public information. I wish we wouldn't do that.
I get your point, but you were wondering where the toxicity was and even if we ignore the circumstantial facts and we do not point the finger at anyone, what we can clearly see in those threads is that the discussion [in the official threads and by official members] is not healthy at all, hence the toxicity.
Some of the allegations in this post are worrisome (like the handling of travel costs, and the papering over of legitimate concerns around Palantir). But (and maybe this is just my shortsightedness) nothing explicitly stated rises to the level of "toxicity." I wish the community would be given more information so that we could fairly evaluate and justify the use of that word.