Updates from Rust Commercial Network (RCN)
This past June, the Rust Foundation officially launched the Rust Commercial Network (RCN), creating a way for companies and the Rust-focused community to work together to advance Rust adoption. The Rust community is composed of members of the Rust Project, and individuals using Rust in their personal and professional lives. In just two months we have over 100 individuals subscribed to our mailing list and close to 50 companies in the network.
To learn more about what the RCN has discussed recently, read our June and July meeting minutes.
But before I talk about what we’ve done over the last couple of months, I want to take a minute to recognize the RCN’s Steering Committee (SC). The SC is comprised of members from each level of the Rust Foundation’s membership base:
- Platinum: Jess Izen (AWS)
- Gold: Scott McNew (Canonical)
- Silver: Vitaly Bragilevsky (JetBrains) and Jonas Kruckenberg (Mainmatter)
- Associate: Roxana Hadad (Processing Foundation)
- Advisors: David Wood (the Rust Project), and myself, on behalf of the Rust Foundation
The SC has been instrumental in getting the RCN off the ground by finalizing the framework the RCN uses to operate and by working with the community to identify topics of interest.
Recent RCN Activities & Updates
The RCN meets monthly (meeting info is listed on our calendar). Async conversations around topics occur within the Commercial Network Channel in the Rust Project’s Zulip instance. There are over 20 individual threads on a variety of topics including:
- #commercial-network > Battery Pack-powered Extended Standard Libraries
- #commercial-network > Long-Term Support (LTS) Rust toolchain
- #commercial-network > List of ecosystem gap
- #commercial-network > Safety-Critical Rust (Consortium)
- #commercial-network > Marketing Kit, Case Studies
One of the most notable efforts the RCN is working on is one of the hardest problems facing open source: funding maintainers in the Rust project and broader Rust ecosystem. This need for open conversations and funding streams has created two unique opportunities for both the commercial space and the Project. Jess Izen of AWS and Predrag Gruevski of OpenAI and cargo-semver-checks created #commercial-network > Funding Initiative office hours where they openly discuss budgets to funding opportunities, coach members on how to pitch budgets to leadership and discuss other funding opportunities and concerns.
The other place where the RCN is tackling the funding issue is within the RCN’s Funding Directory. The directory lists projects within the Rust ecosystem that are seeking funding from companies using Rust at scale. It includes work on the Rust compiler, Cargo, tooling, libraries, and crates published on crates.io. Instead of one company funding a project, this is an opportunity for multiple companies to pool their resources to fund Rust-based projects at scale. This empowers the projects in search of funding and companies working to strengthen the infrastructure they rely on.
These are just some of the updates that are happening within the Rust Commercial Network. If you would like to be a part of our network fill out our application form. You’ll be added to our list of participating companies and our mailing list for up-to-date information.
