Linus responds to Hellwig - "the pull request you objected to DID NOT TOUCH THE DMA LAYER AT ALL... if you as a maintainer feel that you control who or what can use your code, YOU ARE WRONG."
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It appears so now, yes, but when the drama initially came out it sounded like they were asking for a tiny amount of rust in the kernel to make it work, or if not rust, changing the C to tailor it specifically to the rust. Which I think is a reasonable thing to be concerned about from a maintainability perspective long-term, especially if the rust developers decide to leave randomly (Hector's abrupt quitting over this very issue is a prime example).
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I'd venture to guess this isn't the first time Linus has had to deal with devs who have ideological disagreements and one quits. It's not also his job to keep that from happening. What he said is true, there's a process they have for maintaining Linux, and it doesn't involve flame wars on social media.....it involves flame wars over email
.But seriously, if a devs are going to get upset at each other and rage quit, it's not Linus' job to play mediator.
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I want to be clear that I'm commenting solely on the expectation of a swifter response from leadership in the original email thread and not on Marcan's decision to step down, which I can't be the judge of.
One was a direct result of the other. You can't separate them.
they might try to resolve things in private first (seems to be the case)
Neither of them have the authority to resolve it in private and it was clear by the third message that there would be no resolution between them.
they might want to chime in when people have calmed down
They didn't calm down, it was plain to see that things were only becoming more and more heated until the conversation reached a breaking point.
Marcan asked Linus to come in and make an authoritative statement and end the bickering and he did not. Hector interpreted that as Linus being apathetic (which is a rational position given the time that had passed). I'm not going to try and judge Linus, I don't know what was going on in his life at the time, but it was, as Hector stated, a failure of leadership regardless.
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Except that's literally the reality with computers. Everything evolves and things go obsolete. I'm sure the COBOL and Fortran programmers were pissed when the kids started using C too.
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You mean the operating system with a cuckold license? Nothx
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it used to be hard to imagining anyone wanting to work w someone as toxic as linus; but i've learned after my first 2 tenures at faang that developers are no different than kardashian worshippers.
devs getting angry at each other and then rage quiting is just a sympton of a tribalistically shared belief of intellectual superiority among developers like when kardashian sisters have beef with each other and their followers attack each other for it.
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Are we hating on Linus here or agreeing with him? I'm so out of the loop.
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(slang) Someone who glazes (to compliment or praise someone excessively in a cringeworthy way); an asskisser or sycophant.
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Agreeing
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That's not to say any other OS effort is not also a soap opera. I bet Microsoft has its fair share of drama, too; it's just that no one sees it because the development effort is proprietary.
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That is not how it will happen, if it ever fully converts at all.
Rust will first be added in a way that allows it to run on top of existing C code. That is what we are seeing here with Rust being used to write drivers.
As sub-systems get overhauled and replaced, sometimes Rust will be chosen as the language to do that. In these cases, a sub-system or module will be written in Rust and both C code and Rust code will use it (call into it).
The above is how the Linux kernel may migrate to Rust (or mostly Rust) over time.
As devs get more comfortable, there may be some areas of the kernel that mix C and Rust. This is likely to be less common and is probably the most difficult to maintain.
Nobody wants to rewrite working, solid kernel modules in Rust though. So, it seems very likely that the kernel will remain mostly C for a long, long time. There are no doubt a few areas though where Rust will really shine
No need for a fork or a rewrite.
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Instead of thinking about the bindings as part of the sub-system, think of them as part of the driver. That is what Linus is saying here.
The Rust code will be maintained, by those writing Rust code. By those writing the drivers. These are not junior people.
Except the bindings are written so that they can be used not just by this driver but others as well.
If companies write crappy code that calls into these bindings, that is nothing new. They do that today with C. Like C, the code will not be accepted if crappy and / or there is nobody credible to maintain it.
None of this is a good argument for not letting these bindings in.
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This is such a red herring.
The Rust side we are talking about here have been involved for years. They have written amazing code (eg. Apple Silicon GPU drivers). There is an official Fedora spin based on their work.
What makes you think any of that is going to go away?
In fact, this whole incident shows their depth as the project lead quit Linux in disgust and was quickly replaced with another talented, dedicated, and proven developer.
There is a lot more drive-by C code you should worry about.
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A lot of people commenting on this seem to have gaps in their knowledge of what happened
We're in a Linus-email-
-thread, so that kind of goes without saying doesn't it? 
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We've lost two this week
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Excuse me sir why would You ever disagree with our king linus
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He understands Rust and claims to like it. He simply disagrees with the decision to have a mixed language kernel and is trying to unilaterally stop it from happening.
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Here's the thing though, is Marcan got called out (rightfully) for his shit by Linus, but Linus could have called out Hellwig in the same email. The lack of that, to my reading, felt like implicit support of Hellwig's position to me, and I can see why Marcan would have felt the same way.
In saying that, it would also be fair for Linus to not "give in to the pressure" of Marcan's actions on social media and basically given him what he wanted.
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A bunch of people were trying to make that argument to explain Hellwig's disagreement, but it was never the case. His argument amounted to "you can't make create unified code to reference mine, you must have each driver maintain its own independent calls to my code".
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I'm personally not a fan of permissible licenses, but you don't need to bring your fetishes up in every conversation.
