Some additional thoughts (responding to myself here):

Say what I think with as neutral tone as possible and leave it at that

A hypothetical person might respond to this “But I have strong feelings on subject X!”

To which I respond: consider what effect your words will have. Inflammatory words will just entrench people’s position more, in both camps. People on the fence are likely to walk away from the whole thing out of disgust (especially if both sides behave that way) or take the side of your opposition.

Reasoned arguments in neutral tone however will rarely change the opinion of those who strongly disagree with you (there is a slim chance). But it might strike a chord with those who are on the fence.

A tendency for debates to get polarised is a general problem in modern society in my opinion, not just in Rust. Not just politics. Not just media. Pretty much everywhere. I have seen it here on lemmyrs.org as well in the discussion of the drama around lib.rs. But I don’t think calling out specific instances would do any good (rather the opposite in fact, as it might easily be interpreted as an attack on the posters person).

Well, Rust is MIT + Apache 2.0, so they can do this. It isn’t copyleft.

Personally I consider it a a shame that rust and it’s ecosystem isn’t at least weakly copyleft (e.g. LGPL or MPL) though there are some good reasons not to use those specifically. (LGPL isn’t not well defined if you don’t use dynamic linking, MPL is younger than rust, but would have been an excellent fit otherwise). And the ecosystem follows the leader for the most part.

But that is neither here nor there, and I’m not interested in arguing about licenses on the Internet. :)

That sounds potentially useful.

I have wondered at times what ipfs was for. What can you find on it that isn’t on the normal web? What is the killer application for it (and please don’t answer anything related to crypto currency, I’m not a fan of those)?

Maybe this can help answer that?

All this drama is sad. I like lib.rs, it has better search results and easier to use UI than crates.io.

If it was me who ran it (and it isn’t) I’d probably include crypto results but put a big banner on top of their pages (and small ones in their search results) about me distancing myself from that. The crucial thing I belive is to make it clear what is happening, and to communicate clearly and transparently.

I wouldn’t reuse “deprecated” tag, nor use derogatory wording in general. While i agree with the sentiment that crypto is a major problem and rather useless, some of the wording lib.rs has used is rather loaded, and feels like it can be interpreted as akin to name calling.

I found that the best way to reduce drama in my life is to not get sucked in. Say what I think with as neutral tone as possible and leave it at that. Not always easy, but I strive for it (which is what I’m attempting to do here, and why I rewrote some parts of this post after reading it and thinking about how it could be interpreted).

Additionally, I hope the author will reconsider the move to closed source, because I dont think that will solve anything. Rather it risks adding fuel to the fire, since people wanting to argue will point to this and say “look, we have no idea how it works any more, you can’t trust it” (or even worse things).

Quite the opposite, GPL is copyleft, while MIT is permissive.

I have done some small experiments (not much beyond a blinking light at this point) and I feel that the main issue right now for a beginner is that the documentation isn’t there yet. By far.

Also I have read that many of the crates that use the same bus don’t play well with each other (e.g. two devices on the same i2c bus) even though that is what embedded-hal is supposed to be all about. Many early crates are also abandoned apparently, further compounding this problem. I don’t have enough personal experience though to tell if this is true.