So here comes the in-fighting. Looks like someone listened to the call to action to fork the language [0] and just did that to their 'beloved' language.
Again, the moment the Rust Foundation chose to be a 501(c)(6) it was all going to go downhill from there as I and others have warned about this [1] years before.
There is a good reason why other language foundations like Python Software Foundation, NumFocus (Julia lang), D Language Foundation, Zig Software Foundation, R Foundation, etc, are 501(c)(3).
I’m struggling to understand why the IRS nonprofit type is material here. Your previous post doesn’t really explain it either: a 501(c)(3) can impose trademark restrictions in the exact same way.
I don't think anybody can impose trademark restrictions the way the Rust Foundation was planing to...
But anyway, the details of how a non-profit is created have a lot of impact on the incentives for their managers.
Not anybody. The claim was that there’s no difference between individual nonprofit types in terms of trademarking abilities: the Rust trademark policy could just as easily exist under a (c)(3).
(c)(3)s serve the public interest; (c)(6)s serve the interests of their members. But this doesn’t imply anything about a management class; it’s just a simpler and less fraught way to achieve tax-exempt status for a software community, especially one that was originally smaller.