Josh chats with Lori Lorusso and Niko Matsakis about the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund. This is a new project the Rust Foundation has create to help fund Rust maintainers. It’s a great discussion where Lori and Niko cover all the ways they expect to fund the maintainers which is never as easy as one initially expects. Funding open source is a huge topic right now, it sounds like the Rust Foundation has some great ideas.

This episode is also available as a podcast, search for “Open Source Security” on your favorite podcast player.

Episode Transcript

Josh Bressers (00:00) Today, Open Source Security is talking to Lori Lorusso the director of Outreach for the Rust Foundation, and Niko Matsakis one of the lead designers of the Rust programming language and a senior principal engineer in Amazon. Lori and Niko have been kind enough to join me today to talk about some things the Rust Foundation has going on around.

you know, I guess like long term stability we’ll call it maybe, but I’ll let the two of you kind of introduce what’s going on in and yourselves and and we’ll take it from there. So, Lori, I’ll start with you ‘cause you’re at the top of my list when I look at my screen here.

Lori Lorusso (00:30) Well, that makes me feel very special. So thank you, Josh, and thanks for having us on. so although I am the director of outreach for the Rust Foundation, I am here today as part of the Rust Project’s funding team and to talk about something that’s very near and dear to our hearts, which is the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund. so this is something that was born out of a need for sustainability of the project, the people, the humans behind the code that make Rust what it is today.

Josh Bressers (00:59) Niko.

Niko MAtsakis (01:01) Well yeah, so my name Niko. I I’ve been involved in Rust since two thousand eleven, so I’ve kind of done a little bit of everything. But lately, moving a bit away from the nitty gritty of the language design, at least some of the time, trying to working with Lori a lot of the time as it happens, stand up these kind of project organizational initiatives to get more funding.

directed to both Rust maintainers in the Rust project but also across the ecosystem to help us organize our goals and stay focused on the right things and not just chasing, you know, shiny objects and generally kind of be more effective at that at that organizational level.

Josh Bressers (01:46) Nice, nice. And and you’re both here because I talked to Tobias a couple months ago about crates.io trusted publishing and and I read your blog post about the maintainers fund and I was like, Tobias, who can I talk to? You know, hook me up with someone. And so I’m I’m I th I’m very thankful for for him for for hooking you up. But let’s just start with kind of what is the the Rust maintainers fund? Because a little bit of research I did there is an and

The blog post I saw that really kicked all this off was at the beginning of June 2026. And I found a blog post from I think January of twenty six where you kind of announced some of this to to be starting. So I’ll let the two of you kind of bicker back and forth over, like just ex explain this concept to us and and what we’re just dealing with here.

Lori Lorusso (02:32) So I think from the Rust Foundation side, part of like my job exists because I need to be the liaison between the foundation and the project and sort of bridge the gap between commercial users and those building the language. And one of the things that we are really working towards is how to fund open source. And I think that goes for open source in general. And the answer that we came up with is the Rust Foundation maintainers fund. So

Corporate organizations, we have a GitHub page as well for small individual donors as well, can put their money behind the project that they’re using. And one of the things that we realized is the best way to try and disperse the funds is to get the project involved and have the project raise their hand and give us a voice as to what they need. And Niko has been really instrumental in bootstrapping what was the

r lots of words, Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund subcommittee, which he put in the RFC to then create the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund funding team so that we could disperse the funds. So Niko, I this has been like your brainchild and your baby if you wanna kind of explain it a little bit more.

Niko MAtsakis (03:50) Yeah. I mean, I feel like to to step back a bit, I feel like in the time I’ve been working in in and around open source, this question of how to make it sustainable has always been there, right? And it’s just a constant question mark. I’ve been pretty fortunate to always get you know, always be working at a company or with a sponsor, so I’ve never had to really d sort of deal with that myself. But what I am

I’ve tried a bunch of things over the years and I’m kind of most excited about the maintainer fund because in some ways it’s kind of a response to some of the things that I found don’t work as well. or at least aren’t incomplete is usually the case, right? Which is I think it’s like in my view, it’s necessary and super important to have companies paying people to work in open source directly, not just paying money to open source organizations, but actually funding contributors. but what they usually

are not well incentivized to fund is kind of open directed, open ended maintenance, right? and so they’ll they’ll it’s it’s often much, much easier to make the case for, hey, I should go contribute because we need feature X or we need you know more optimization in this area that’s gonna impact the company’s bottom line or help our people get progress. But it’s much harder to make the case for like I should review PRs because unexpectedly good things are going to come

in through that channel and I’m gonna, you know, help them happen. But but my view is that’s kind of what makes open source so great, actually, right? Is that you have companies doing the most important thing f making sure that they’re funding people to work on the most important thing for them. Those are the headline things. But also you have a much broader community doing the things that are second and third on those lists. The the kind of items that never get to the top of the priority list if you’re just looking at like what will make the biggest impact.

But which actually are super important and have a huge impact overall on the project. Right. And so I’m looking for ways to to kind of fund the whole picture. That’s that’s sort of the big picture view. It’s not looking at the actual mechanism at all. It’s more like what I hope we get out of it, which is sustainable funding in both those modes.

Josh Bressers (06:03) Th that’s amazing. I I love that. Sorry, go on, Lori.

Lori Lorusso (06:04) And I

Yeah, and I think like open source did itself a favor in saying like it’s free, but people are thinking free as in beer and not free as in freedom of choice to choose what you want. And that is where I think this sustainability issue really kind of is grounded in is that people do have the freedom of choice to use something that’s open source, but they’re building their projects and their tooling and their products on the backs of those that are doing this, you know, out of their free time and

The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund is looking to help those volunteers, because they’re volunteers, sustain and support themselves. And, you know, like Niko, I’ve been very fortunate to have a job in open source where I’m getting paid to be in open source. And now it’s up to us to give a voice to those that are doing the work. And I think what makes our fund unique is that again, the project is.

letting us know the funding team, and there’s four of us on the funding team, what they need, what they want to work on. And then we can direct those funds to those specific areas. So you know, if a corporate off like company has a a feature they want to get done, but they can’t get it done, is that they’re not realizing that to Niko’s point, it’s the foundation has to be complete before you can build on top of it. And if we’re not supporting the foundation and making sure that that’s strong, then

what you want, you know, unless you’re willing to put in either the work and become contributors and hopefully move up to maintainers, but also the money to support again those that are there, then it’s not gonna it’s not gonna happen. So this is a way to ensure that we have a very strong foundation so that when you like try to put in a feature and of course you have to go through all the contributor guidelines and all the good things, you have a better chance of of getting things enacted because again, the people that are

building the language that you’re using are being supported by those using the language.

Josh Bressers (08:10) Okay, I wanna clarify. We you you both of you have mentioned foundation, and we we mean that like the foundation of the Rust ecosystem, not the Rust Foundation, which I guess is Yay English. But no, it’s it but but okay, I I wanna I wanna clarify, because this is what I have read, and I’ve dug through a bunch of your blog posts, and I I love that you file RFCs for everything. Like it’s so nerdy, it’s awesome. But so

Lori Lorusso (08:20) Right. Sorry. It’s in my name. I can’t help it.

Niko MAtsakis (08:24) gonna say, I don’t know. It works both ways. It’s pun intended.

Josh Bressers (08:38) What you’re talking about when you say foundation is is things like I’ll I hesitate to say keeping the lights on necessarily, but we’ll call it like the thankless work of open source, where you have to shepherd pull requests, you have to work with, you know, new new contributors to a project, you’ve got to keep the CI system green. You know, there’s all this like Morlock work that goes into every single open source project that I think often doesn’t get any attention and quite frankly can be

impossible to fund in many instances. And I think we’ve seen countless open source projects, you know, fail because of that stuff, because it isn’t the shiny, sexy, exciting work. So I think the in the context of foundation you’re talking about there, like this is the stuff that like truly allows the Rust project to exist and for these crazy awesome features to be built on top of. Did I get that right?

Niko MAtsakis (09:30) I I think by and large, yeah. I I guess I would draw a s maybe not necessarily draw a distinction, but go a little deeper and say I feel like there’s there’s we actually had a blog post on this. I think Jakub boy, what is his last name? I only ever refer to him by his internet names. Yeah, anyway, I’ll look it up later. But Beránek is this his username. Jakub Beránek that’s it. wrote it.

But about what is maintenance anyway. And the one of the interesting things in that post is kind of, you know, how hard it is to really define what this work is, because when you start digging in, it’s often more of a mentality than it is like the actual work items. So I would say that a lot of that keep the lights on work definitely I mean, all of it definitely qualifies as maintenance. A lot of it is being done by like paid engineers at the Rust Foundation, actually.

Josh Bressers (10:01) Yes.

Niko MAtsakis (10:24) a lot of like the really core infrastructure and maintenance work. And so it isn’t really the target of this fund in some sense. But a a bunch of other I guess it’s like fifty f I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s a d it’s a division between paid engineers at the foundation a and people who are doing it either on the side or as volunteers or else at their job for whatever reason. But but there’s a bunch of other things too. Like I think one of the things that came out the most clearly, Lori ran a great series of interviews with team basically teams across the Rust project.

And the one common theme that we heard from every single team was like, actually a lot of the incremental work isn’t that bad. Reviewing PRs isn’t that bad to do as a volunteer because it’s t you know, any individual PR doesn’t take that long and you can kind of do it in the spare time. But what’s really hard is sustained focus. So if you wanna refactor, if you wanna take the code and make a really big change that’s gonna just take like three months of of doing it.

That is essentially doesn’t happen unless you have someone paid to to do it who can really devote forty hours a week to that problem, you know. And so that I think is in some ways, at least for me, the the problem number one we’re looking to actually solve is some areas of of the project have paid people who are able to do those things, but many do not, and can we get more of that continuous attention and deep focus brought to as many parts of the project as we can?

Lori Lorusso (11:53) And I think like i adding to that is that there are a lot of team members that want to do that work, but they just can’t, you know, and it’s not like they can just cherry pick what they can focus on because they have to again support themselves. So, hopefully this fund, you know, now that we’re bootstrapping it, you know, and people are gonna see this and hear this and then just money’s gonna start rolling in, we can start to fund

more individuals that can take the time to really scope out what that means and you know, really address some of the bigger sort of problems that are coming up in the space that they just don’t have the time to address.

Josh Bressers (12:34) So is this what I I see there’s a term you call maintainer in residence. Is that what we’re talking about here?

Niko MAtsakis (12:42) Yeah. Basically. I mean the maintainer and Okay. So a maintainer in residence is is one of the things one of the programs we we introduced in the RFC. It’s not the only thing that we’re gonna use. We we kind of drew a distinction where the maintainer fund monies will come in to the funding team which will distribute them in various ways. Right. One of which and probably the premiere of which is the maintainer and residence program. but there are some other things that we think are important ‘cause kind of no one size fits all, right? And

Josh Bressers (12:45) So explain that to us though.

Niko MAtsakis (13:11) The idea is basically is it’s modeled after the Python Software Foundation’s director in residence or sorry, developer in residence. And it’s essentially a contract to do maintenance work for full time for a year with the expectation that it’ll be renewed. that’s sort of subject to hum how we do raising funding, but that’s our hope is that it continues year over year. and you know

I think the the goal is to sort of be a resource for the teams that you’re work that you’re sort of tending to. And not I I have to be careful how I phrase that. I think not it I guess it will depend, I think, how how much you’re being a resource in the form of the teams are telling you this is what we need. You’re usually a member of the team anyway, so you kinda know. I think it’s more like there are these things where i if you’ve ever been in a in a Rust open source meeting and I have to assume it’s similar, w you know, we’re like, okay

Clearly we need to do X. Who wants to do it? And then it’s like crickets, right? You can be the one who raises your hand and says, Hey, I got time for that actually, because that’s what I’m getting paid to do. Just pick up those items that everyone agrees are important, but nobody has time to do and to pursue those longer term improvements. Does that make sense? That sounds right, Lori?

Lori Lorusso (14:26) it sounds great. and when we talk about kind of these like longer term improvements, we just had an all hands as a part of Rust Week, which was great because the project then gets to come together and talk to each other in person and talk about all the things that they’d like to get done and move things forward. And this is kind of a really to Niko saying, you know, mirrors aren’t the only way, but like finding teams, you know

cross-cutting team, someone that it works on compiler, but also someone else that works on Lang and someone that works in the Libs team, you know, figuring out how we can have them all sort of work together. How can we fund them to to move something across the line? there’s also the project goals that Niko started a couple years ago with the project that we’re hoping to be able to bring some attention to and get funding for those. Niko, I think you should riff on what the project goals are because it’s really cool.

Niko MAtsakis (15:23) Okay.

Josh Bressers (15:26) Yeah, no, this is great. I’m learning a ton. I’m loving this.

Niko MAtsakis (15:28) Right.

I can talk about project goals forever. so the project goals is I think a a foundational again on another use of that word, sort of part of the organizational structure. And it’s it’s in response to a couple of prior attempts to organize different kind of roadmaps with Rust that worked at their time, I think, reasonably well, but but sort of hit scaling limits as as Rust grew. Right. And you kinda have this fundamental challenge of on the one hand, y you know, you don’t wanna be totally open ended on what you’re working on because

It’s very confusing, it leads to a lot of problems. and people don’t really know, like it just l leads to a lot of confusion and wasted effort and also disappointment and hurt feelings, what I found. So if if you’re an open source project and you’re sort of not saying clearly what you think is important, maybe because you don’t really know, actually, everyone has their own idea of what’s important, you don’t have a unified sense, then somebody comes along and think you know, and puts a whole bunch of work into some project.

that never makes it over the line because actually it wasn’t desired by most people or has certain misalignments and that that can lead to a lot of kind of wasted effort and and frustration. so the idea of project goals is let’s bring a couple things together. Let’s have somebody propose the contributor, here’s work I want to do. And then let’s have the maintainers, which is the team teams potentially, that need to sort of approve that work. Like who’s gonna need to review that PR? Who’s gonna need to make that decision?

say yeah we want you to do that work. Right. And the third sometimes at least the third underpinning is and let’s have the companies that value it say, yeah, we’ll pay you to do it. Right. because a lot of times like one of those if any one of those three legs is missing, the work will not happen. Right. And the big difference between the project goals and prior attempts we had at roadmaps was that prior attempts was basically we would sit down among the like Rust whatever leadership or whomever it was.

And we we would kind of say, here’s some stuff we agree is important. And then we just discuss it with the found with the community and we reach a big consensus. But so what? Because here was a bunch of goals, but we didn’t have any people signing up to do those goals necessarily. So like in reality, many of them just never happened. It was like year after year, yeah, this is important. Okay. But the way a project goal works is actually begins with somebody saying, I’m here to do it, I’m willing to do it, but I need these things. I need the team to agree it’s important.

and make sure that they review my work on a timely basis. Or I need funding because I don’t actually have a a source of funding. and so having those sort of beginning with someone’s going to do it, but then arranging the the lane so that that when they actually get started, they can make progress, right? Rather than they start going and they immediately hit obstacles ‘cause people aren’t aligned is kind of the idea.

Josh Bressers (18:19) Yeah. Yeah. That I mean I’ve seen that more than once where someone submits some monster PR to an open source project and the project’s like, we don’t really want to do this And that’s I mean it’s gotta be soul crushing. I mean, you know.

Niko MAtsakis (18:27) Yeah. That

that that’s actually why we started RFCs in the first place, was because people were opening PRs that were not what we wanted or were sort of aimed at what we wanted but not the way we wanted it. And it it was leading to a lot of irrit sort of frustration on both sides where it’s like, I don’t really want to review this gigantic PR that that you wrote because it’s not what I want, but also I don’t want to tell you to go away ‘cause you put in a lot of work and you’re clearly very talented. If only we had a a line beforehand.

Josh Bressers (18:54) Yeah. Yeah.

Niko MAtsakis (18:56) Things would have been better.

Josh Bressers (18:58) For sure, for sure. Okay. I wanna I wanna kinda steer us into the funding conversation a little bit because I think this one’s like super important and always really interesting because I’ve talked to a lot of open source, you know, companies, a lot of open source foundations, a lot of open source projects, and the funding is always just like it’s all over the freaking board. So I’ll just I’ll just start with an easy question, we’ll say, which is so the Rust Foundation already has like their kind of income and their existing funding streams. Is this like part of that or is this

a completely separate universe as far as like funding this project.

Lori Lorusso (19:30) It’s separate. So we just had a new member come on, OpenAI, which is amazing. so they are now Rust Foundation Platinum members. But in addition to that, they donated an additional chunk of change to go towards the RFMF and a couple of other sort of directed funding avenues. And that’s what we’re like from a massive corporate donor, that’s what we want. We want to

you know, support the foundation via membership and to Niko’s point, that keeps the infrastructure running, that like funds those engineers that are doing that work. but then also, you know, independently from that, fund the project via like the RFMF and other other initiatives like that. And you know, we’re we’re at a point where Rust has been around for over 10 years and it’s a scaling issue, right? Where you want your open source project to get adopted, you want people to use it, you want all of this, and then you get there and you’re like,

but wait, like where are the funds to support this? So, like, it it goes hand in hand. Again, like supporting those that like the humans behind the code, you know, like if you’re standing on their shoulders, you gotta give them a little something.

Niko MAtsakis (20:44) W the way I see it is like the foundation membership is the ante. It it’s it just gets you in the door. And we need to do it. We need to have that foundation. We need the the systems to run. but it’s not the end of the story. You have to sort of then you have to put your bets on what you think is important and what you want to see happen.

Josh Bressers (21:04) Sure, for sure. And so this is one of those those things I think also that is it it can be confusing sometimes to organizations and people where like donating money to a foundation doesn’t like it’s not like having cus you know a a vendor relationship where you get to like make demands and say like I gave you money, you have to do this for me and things like that. Like that is not the intent here, right?

Lori Lorusso (21:30) Exactly. What those are called directed funds. And we definitely accept those. we had was it Microsoft donate a million dollars for a certain initiative. Google donated money for Interop initiative, you know, and that’s sort of like okay, these are the these are what we’re going to use that money for, you know, supporting people working in this space. The maintainers fund is not that. It is

Josh Bressers (21:42) Right.

Lori Lorusso (21:55) The project has a funding team and that funding team is gonna go through all the applications and forms we received and don’t and and put the money where it’s most needed via the project versus what we have. Which again, we need more money. So, you know, keep donating.

Josh Bressers (22:11) Right.

Niko MAtsakis (22:12) So the

the the project goals though do have some of that flavor, right? They I think they’re they’re kind of a compliment in this way. And and they’re actually aimed at exactly this problem because on the one hand, I I think it’s a good thing. Like on the one hand there’s a fear of companies are gonna come in and they’re just gonna make Rust into whatever they need instead of what Rust needs to be. Which makes sense. On the other hand, I’m like, if the user wants it to be that, like as long as it’s balanced and makes sense, it’s actually good. It’s sort of a form of prioritization. It’s part of what makes open source work is

You don’t need to have a big product manager because you have people coming and telling you what they want from themselves, right? on the other hand, you a lot of times people have a vague idea what they want, but they may not know what the possibilities are and so on. So the idea of the project goals is kind of like coming from either from contributors, but a lot of times from the people who maintain Rust and are working closely, most closely in the community. Here’s a kind of menu of improvements that we all agree are good. Right? Everyone wants these. There’s no controversy about should we do X.

controversy is can we find the funding and resourcing to do X? and that’s a great way. Like if a company can just come in and and find something on that list and back it, it’s like a win for everyone involved. It also makes sure that the people who’ve been doing a lot of the a lot of times there’s somebody who’s been laying the groundwork for that feature for many years, right? And not necessarily getting recognized or compensated for it. and this kind of makes sure that they’re in the loop.

Josh Bressers (23:35) Yeah, yeah. Okay, Lori, so you said a moment ago about forms and applications. So I assume this is how you’re deciding where to direct all these funds. So like I’m curious, what can you tell us about that whole process and universe?

Lori Lorusso (23:52) So it’s specifically just for project team members to fill out and there’s a series of questions. We tried to make the form as lightweight as possible. We took a lot of feedback from project members and and wanted to make sure that we weren’t putting like an undue burden on people trying to fill it out. And what you hear a lot from the project is they don’t want to take money from someone else. So they were very hesitant to even fill out the form.

And I think we did a really good job. and like I said, Jakub has been really good as well as Pete, like pushing people to fill out the form so that we can understand what it is that they’re doing, what they would like to keep doing, can they do it full time, can they do it part time, when can they start? Sort of like anything you would need in a very like high level, I don’t wanna call it like a job application, but just like let us know what you wanna do and like and also how much

Do you want to be paid for that? Like how many hours do you think that you can put towards this? you know, if you’re have a full time job but you really like working on Rust and you can donate like ten hours of your time or you’ve been you’ve been donating ten hours of your time a month but now it’s getting very hard, you know, put that down. I can do ten hours. I would like to be paid for my ten hours, you know? like

We’ve worked really hard and again because we’ve just sort of launched it, we’re happy to make tweaks as we go along, but it’s a nice snapshot of areas of the project that we didn’t maybe realize were underfunded. in the land of tech layoffs, there are people that maybe had corporate jobs last year that are now looking for funding to continue the work that they did when they were at a corporate office and aren’t anymore. So we’re really trying to be as

flexible as possible and as encouraging as possible to let people know like we just want to know what we can do. And then depending on the funds, we may not be able to like fund you for ten hours, but we might be able to fund you for five. You know, like because again we want to be as equitable as possible. so I’m gonna say it again, keep those funds coming in so that we can, you know, support more people.

Josh Bressers (26:05) Yeah, yeah. A a hundred percent.

all right. Okay. So we cover the financing, we cover kind of handing this stuff out. So I’m curious like

Is is this started already? When when does it start? Like when can we expect to hear about, you know, the the wild success from from the how this project is going?

Niko MAtsakis (26:23) we are we have distributed zero dollars so far, but that’s because we’re just getting started. And in fact we’re kind of making those decisions right now. So I think we’re gonna we’re trying to we we s we’ve just finished kind of taking the the s the temperature of the project, getting a first round of of people filling out who needs what kind of help and now we’re trying to match that against what funds we have. And it’s definitely one of these things where you have to bootstrap, right? You start out with a relatively modest

Josh Bressers (26:29) Yeah, yeah.

Nice.

Niko MAtsakis (26:52) beginning because that’s how much money you’ve got, but once you start showing the the results from from that funding, then it’s easier to get more. so we’re expecting I guess I would say y you won’t I don’t I want to tamper set expectations properly. There maybe you won’t be hearing about the tremendous success initially, but you’ll be hearing about the modest initial success and the continued exponential growth thereafter. Right

Josh Bressers (27:12) Nice.

on. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I mean this is one of those things that’s always really hard too, because you I would say the people who apply and and either don’t get as much as they hoped or or don’t get picked or whatever in the first round, you know, it’s like it it it’s one of those kind of devastating things, you know, and it it it’s tough always, especially when you’re in the position of the person who has to make these choices, right? Because it’s just so hard.

Niko MAtsakis (27:41) Yeah. One one thing that I think we’re we didn’t hit on it much, but I’ll just mention it briefly is that we are looking to use different shapes too, right? Because like the maintainer in residence is great. That’s sort of aiming for that full time role. But there are a lot of people who are telling us things like, you know, actually like I’m self funded or retired or I don’t actually need that much money, but I just need a a thousand dollars a month or something like that would make a big difference, sort of help me justify the the work I’m doing. Or

I actually have very specific goals I want to work towards, in which case maybe a project goal is good and and it that’s sort of easier for us to go out and fundraise for because now we’re saying instead of saying support this open ended maintenance, we swear it’s good, we’re saying put in some money and get out feature that you want. Right. And when we do that, we’re also including in it like a little let’s say an overhead or a side channel of okay, and by the way, ten percent or twenty percent of that is going into the maintainer fund to support

Rust in general, but this you know that you don’t necessarily have to only when you when you drill in that’s kind of just part of the deal. And it makes sense ‘cause you in the end of the day you can’t land the feature without someone to review the code. Right. So it’s just required.

Lori Lorusso (28:55) And one of the things I think is again like really unique is as Niko just said, we can go out and try and get funding for specific things like project goals. And what we just launched from the found Rust Foundation side was the Rust Commercial Network. And it is a network of corporations and individuals that are adopting Rust, looking to build out, you know, network architecture, things like that. And

Bringing those people, making them aware of the project goals, you know, because now the project again is is the one that’s saying, I want to do this, can you fund what I want to do? Instead of them saying, We want you to do this, we will try to fund that. So it’s now we have a a like a feedback loop, a two-way, two way street. And I think that is just the more we can talk about what people want to do and what people want to get done, the better we can really direct those funds to those individuals.

Josh Bressers (29:51) For sure, for sure. That’s awesome. All right, let’s land this plane. What do we what do we need to know? Obviously it’s easy to say, you know, donate please, which is of course something anyone using Rust, you know, every every organization should should definitely pay attention to. But what does that mean? How can they help? What does what does a donation look like? Where should we go for more information? Like let’s let’s tell the people what they want to know.

Lori Lorusso (30:18) So I would say individual donors that want to support the project, you can go to the Rust Lang funding page. In that, there’s a link to the Rust Foundation GitHub sponsors page and there’s a different a bunch of different levels that you can support at. But additionally, if you scroll down the page, there are individual Rust project maintainers that are looking for funding and you can kind of fund them individually as well.

if you want to make a large corporate donation, you can contact the Rust Foundation and we’d be happy to work with you on what that looks like. you can become a member of the Rust Foundation, and again, we’d be happy to tack on some Rust Foundation maintainers fund add-ons to your your membership. but the Rust Lang funding page has a lot of information for you to go to.

Josh Bressers (31:11) I’ll put a link in the show notes for anyone interested.

Lori Lorusso (31:14) And the project goals page, Niko, I think that would also be sort of helpful to direct people towards

Niko MAtsakis (31:20) Yes. I’ll drop the link for you and you can put it in the show notes, but there’s there’s a page basically rustling github dot io slash rust project goals. which rust dash project dash goals which kinda highlights the main goals for the twenty twenty six and there’s a a thing that says looking to fund, right? And you can click there and those are folks in need of funding.

Josh Bressers (31:44) Yes, it’s in my list. So I do have that link as well. I have this is I was I was telling Lori and Niko for anyone listening, you know, before we hit record, is like I have a lot of tabs open for this show. So I think I try to keep track of everything going on. But this has been I mean, it’s such a cool project. I mean, thank you both for the work you’ve done. Like I love Rust. It is I I don’t know how to say this, but like the last time I was excited to learn a language, and like I suck at Rust. I’m not gonna pretend I’m any good at it by any means, but it was like

I remember I was really excited about Python. Like it feels like it was hundreds of years ago at this point. But like Rust like captures that like childlike glee in me every time I learn a new thing or I see something that it does. And and I don’t know why that is, but it’s just it it’s an amazing and fun project in language. So just I mean, thank you both for the work. It’s it’s great.

Niko MAtsakis (32:32) It’s awesome to hear. Yeah. I kinda feel like we got something right. I don’t people seem to like it. It’s always been a pleasure.

Josh Bressers (32:40) Yeah, yeah.

Lori Lorusso (32:40) a total newbie to the project. I’ve only been with the foundation for like eight or nine months and it is such a welcoming group of project members. Like it I had the most fun at the all hands talking about Rust, talking about a dump bunch of different things, and you know, tent is wide open. Come on in, you know.

Josh Bressers (33:00) Yep, yep. And I’ve heard that from a lot of people that the Rust is one of the the best communities to get involved in and I mean op

Niko MAtsakis (33:08) on

that point there are project goals if you’re looking to contribute. There’s a list there as well.

Josh Bressers (33:12) Yes.

Awesome. Awesome. Okay. I mean this has been this has been a lot of fun. I’ve learned a ton from both of you. I just want to thank you for your time and and I look forward to speaking to you again in the near future to hear about your roaring success. So this is this is awesome. Just thank you. Thank you so much.

Lori Lorusso (33:27) Definitely.

Niko MAtsakis (33:28) Great.

Thank you, Josh.

Lori Lorusso (33:30) Thanks for

having us.