Canonical Joins the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member

Canonical’s Gold-level investment in the Rust Foundation supports the long-term health of the Rust programming language and highlights its growing role in building resilient systems on Ubuntu and beyond.

Please find Canonical’s version of this announcement here: https://canonical.com/blog/canonical-joins-the-rust-foundation-as-a-gold-member

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS — March 23, 2026 (Open Source SecurityCon, KubeCon Europe 2026) — The Rust Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the performance, safety, and sustainability of the Rust programming language, today announced that Canonical has joined the organization as a Gold Member.

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, one of the world’s most widely deployed Linux distributions. Through its broader work maintaining open source software, the company provides long-term security maintenance and support for hundreds of thousands of packages used by developers and organizations worldwide.

Rust Foundation members play a critical role in supporting the governance, infrastructure, and long-term health of Rust. As a Gold Member, Canonical is making a significant investment in that work while supporting the growing use of Rust in production systems.

“Rust has become a foundational technology for building safe and reliable systems, and its continued success depends on strong collaboration between the open source community and the organizations bringing it into production,” said Dr. Rebecca Rumbul, Executive Director and CEO of the Rust Foundation. “Canonical joining the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member is an important signal of Rust’s growing role in large-scale systems.”

Canonical’s work with Rust starts with providing an up-to-date Rust toolchain for the Ubuntu software repositories, but extends to crafting a first-class Rust developer experience on Ubuntu. Ubuntu recently replaced core system components such as the coreutils and sudo with Rust implementations to bolster the resilience of the operating system and cloud platforms it underpins. Through its participation in the Rust Foundation, Canonical is helping support the continued development and stewardship of Rust.

“As the publisher of Ubuntu, we understand the critical role systems software plays in modern infrastructure, and we see Rust as one of the most important tools for building it securely and reliably. Joining the Rust Foundation at the Gold level allows us to engage more directly in language and ecosystem governance, while continuing to improve the developer experience for Rust on Ubuntu.” said Jon Seager, VP Engineering at Canonical. “Of particular interest to Canonical is the security story behind the Rust package registry, crates.io, and minimizing the number of potentially unknown dependencies required to implement core concerns such as async support, HTTP handling, and cryptography – especially in regulated environments.”

Canonical joins a growing group of organizations supporting the Rust Foundation’s mission to steward the Rust programming language and ensure its long-term sustainability. Through collaboration between industry leaders and the open source community, the Foundation works to strengthen the infrastructure and resources that allow Rust to thrive. Other organizations interested in becoming a Rust Foundation member can learn more at rustfoundation.org/get-involved. 

About Canonical

Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, provides open source security, support, and services. Its portfolio covers critical systems, from the smallest devices to the largest clouds, from the kernel to containers, from databases to AI. With customers that include top tech brands, emerging startups, governments, and home users, Canonical delivers trusted open source for everyone. Learn more at https://canonical.com/ 

About the Rust Foundation

The Rust Foundation is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to the safety, security, and sustainability of the Rust programming language and the people who use it. Through partnerships with corporate members and the open source community, the Foundation stewards the long-term health of Rust by investing in its maintainers, infrastructure, security, interoperability, and governance. Learn more at https://rustfoundation.org