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The maintainer of the Actix web framework, written in Rust, has quit the project after complaining of a toxic web community - although over 100 Actix users have since signed a letter of support for him.
Actix Web was developed by Nikolay Kim, who is also a senior software engineer at Microsoft, though the Actix project is not an official Microsoft project. Actix Web is based on Actix, a framework for Rust based on the Actor model, also developed by Kim.
The project is open source and while it is popular, there has been some unhappiness among users about its use of "unsafe" code. In Rust, there is the concept of safe and unsafe. Safe code is protected from common bugs (and more importantly, security vulnerabilities) arising from issues like variables which point to uninitialized memory, or variables which are used after the memory allocated to them has been freed, or attempting to write data to a variable which exceeds the memory allocated. Code in Rust is safe by default, but the language also supports unsafe code, which can be useful for interoperability or to improve performance.
Actix is top of the Techempower benchmarks on some tests
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday January 24 2020, @08:08AM (4 children)
At least with copyleft licenses, the main worry is not that others claim to have written the code, the main worry is that someone makes a derivative product without opening up the changes. If the contribution is anonymous, anyone who decides to violate the license has nothing to fear.
What would work, are copyright assignments, FSF style. That way the actual contributor no longer holds the copyright, and therefore can stay private. However, the copyright assignment includes the right of the contributor to use his own contribution however he pleases (so for the contributed code, he's not bound to the GPL). That also won't work if he stays anonymous.
Maybe a middle ground could be for the contribution to stay anonymous until it is decided whether to include it, but reveal the author afterwards. That could be achieved by the author signing it with an unique private key on submission, and using the same private key to sign his claim of authorship after the fate of the code has been finally decided.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday January 24 2020, @03:26PM
the main worry is that someone makes a derivative product without opening up the changes.
What can be assembled can be disassembled. One way or another the changes will be opened. They can keep it private only as long as they keep the entire product to themselves.
Nobody has to stay anonymous if they don't want to, but it's still the best protection you will find. The only important thing worthy of notice is the code itself. Put everything else aside. It's not a game of who-done-it.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 24 2020, @05:32PM (2 children)
This is simply not true. Under the Berne convention, there is absolutely no requirement to attach your name to a work in order to receive copyright protection for that work. Anonymous and pseudonymous works receive automatic copyright protection like any other eligible work.
The minimum copyright term under the treaty is different when the author is unknown.
If you end up making a claim in a court of law then not having your name on the work may make it harder to demonstrate that you are entitled to copyright protection, but if you keep records it should be possible to do so. This action will probably end up with your name in the public record.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:19AM (1 child)
In most countries, they also have provisions for keeping authorship secret, even when enforcing your rights, as long as you don't assert your rights pro se. The only real downside for anonymous/pseudonymous works is that it can affect the duration of the copyright protection, as it makes it much more difficult to establish the length of the life of the author.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @04:27AM
Yes, the standard established by the Berne convention is that copyright protection for works with unknown authorship extends for 50 years from the date of first publication.
If the author for such a work becomes known before the expiry of copyright protection, then the life+50 year rule takes effect.
Of course, the exact term lengths vary by country.