The Hidden Cost of Rust: A Conversation with Dr. Rebecca Rumbul

ExpressVPN's Pete Membrey interviews Dr. Rebecca Rumbul, CEO of the Rust Foundation, about the sustainability challenges facing open source infrastructure. Key topics include crates.io's explosive growth (100B to 250B downloads in months, pushing 5 petabytes/month with projections of 18PB by end of next year), the precarious reliance on donated cloud credits, and the Rust Foundation's successful lobbying to create a new 'Open Source Steward' legal category under the EU Cyber Resilience Act. Dr. Rumbul argues that major tech companies must treat open-source funding as a core operational expense rather than charity. The conversation also covers Rust's industry adoption (Google's 70% reduction in Android memory safety bugs), Rust's growing role as the engine beneath Python-based AI workloads, and career advice for developers to contribute to open source projects.