Rust is not a Company
Last year, as an occasional contributor to the Rust project, I did not think much about the organisational structure of the team behind the project. I saw a hierarchy of teams and groups, team leaders, etc. Just like any other organisation. This year, after getting more involved, becoming a library team member and eventually team lead, I spent some more time thinking about why we have this structure, what these teams are for.
In most companies, there are directors and shareholders and whatnot at the top of the hierarchy, who set goals for the company. Targets, milestones, deadlines, things that will hopefully drive the company towards whatever the ultimate goal is; usually money.
Then there are several layers of management split over departments and teams to divide up the workload. Each taking care of part of the targets, making sure that their part gets done, eventually assigning tasks to the employees at the bottom of the hierarchy, all working towards the main goal in some way or another.
While the structure behind a big open source project like Rust can look similar from a distance, it’s often completely inverted. In such a project, the targets and goals are not those of the top level team(s), but effectively those of the contributors.
