This is wrong on two readings: the core team is a governance team, not an engineering team, and the people who have raised concerns thus far have been prominent contributors to the Rust ecosystem.

Can't they take their marbles and leave?

Just fork the project, collaborate online over git and get rid of all the bureaucracy/bureaucrats. This used to be quite common (that's why we have so many BSD distributions).

Which “marbles”? Rust is as much of a service ecosystem (crates.io, docs.rs) as it is an implementation of the Rust programming language.

The BSDs, for better or worse, didn’t have this problem because they mostly forked in the 90s and early 2000s. There were fewer (beneficial!) ecosystem assumptions.

And besides, this assumes that anybody really wants to do something as drastic as fork. I’m not privy to any of this, but it seems like the most “extreme” public position is nowhere close to forking Rust itself.

They aren't the "coders" of the Rust project.

[This is what can happen when you forget to delete your dumb HN comment before the configured delay time. Sometimes it gets cemented with replies and then embarrassingly upvoted.]

If they aren't coders and are "toxic" on top of that, get rid of them? Looks like a no-brainer to me.

People upvoted my clueless comment because the assumption is that any people called "core" of a FOSS project must be the coders, or else something is wrong.

There's an easy fix. Don't comment on stuff when you don't know what you're talking about. It's pretty simple.

If you want a hint on what's wrong, here's one for you: discourse on the Internet sucks in part because of people such as yourself making "clueless" comments.

Thanks for the feedback. Because of the way HN works, it supports a "nonlinear comment development process". You jot some random ideas into a comment, which can often turn into a good comment after several edits (in which those ideas no longer appear at all). Or not: it gets deleted before it is seen: there is a configurable delay before your comment goes public. I was sure that one wasn't going to be (in any shape), but I had to respond to some urgent things. That's it.

> If they aren't coders and are "toxic" on top of that, get rid of them? Looks like a no-brainer to me.

The issue is that, there is no process to do that within the Rust-lang organisation. The core team is only accountable to themselves at this point.

There is no process to get rid of them.

The people who actually make Rust could simply disavow that Core Team.

I suspect there are reasons why it doesn't simply go down like that. Perhaps it's simply a lack of motivaton; or else hands being tied in various ways (invariably connected to money somehow).

Probably the best thing you can do as a FOSS developer is never grab any dollar waved in front of you and put it in your pocket, if you see so much as a tiny, barely discernible cotton fiber connecting that dollar to some people or conditions.

History nerd here: there are processes for when a leadership group no longer serves the public interest and is glued to their chairs.

Defenestration doesn't seem appropriate here.

Many in the core team don’t code, don’t even know Rust well, etc.

What a ridiculous assertion! From everything I have personally seen (online discussions, presentations and in-person encounters) about the core team, I would say that each of them is in the top 1 percentile of "knowing Rust well".

Yes, some of them may not have much open source Rust code out there (as they use Rust for commercial/proprietary products), and if they do it's not some "ingenious" solutions that other individual contributors in the Rust ecosystem have created, but they all code, and they all know Rust very well.

Then you must be extremely bad at rust.