Mozilla has been sponsoring the Rust programming language for over a decade, while in 2020 as part of Mozilla’s grand round of layoffs, most of the Rust team was let go, along with the drop of the Servo web engine team. Plans were then drawn up to establish the Rust Foundation as an independent entity.
This non-profit organization to manage the programming language Rust ecosystem is now up and running with the first board meeting for this week. The Rust Foundation’s first board of directors consists of directors of the founding companies of AWS, Huawei, Microsoft, Google and Mozilla. In addition, there are five directors of the project management.
These founding companies will sponsor the Rust work. Mozilla has transferred the trademark and all infrastructure assets (including the Crates.io repository) to the Rust Foundation.
More information about establishing the Rust Foundation to help Rust move forward can be found at foundation.rust-lang.org.