Some questions about the maintainance of axum

[Jos-de-Boss]

Summary

Hi there! I was looking into who's backing and maintaining the Axum framework and have a bunch of questions as this was not clear enough to me in any documentation I could find.

I am not trying to cast any distrust here, but merely trying to get some clarity around the subject and validating my assumptions. What has been achieved with the axum framework looks very impressive. The impressive amount of crates.io downloads and GitHub stars speak for themselves when it comes to community adoption and appreciation.

What is axum's affiliation with the tokio team?

The first thing that stood out to me was that axum falls under the tokio-rs GitHub organization. Looking further into this however I noticed that Axum is not mentioned on the tokio.rs website. When trying to find out more about this I came across the Reddit comment shown bellow that seems to suggest the tokio team is only there as a failsafe in case the current maintainers stop contributing. Is this assumption correct? Could someone elaborate on this any further?

To be honest, the tokio ownership is practically only an admin fallback option. There is no overlap between axum maintainers and tokio (the crate) maintainers. As the current primary maintainer I also have never contributed much to other tokio crates. Maybe David, axum's creator, did.. But I wouldn't know which ones.

Comment by u/j_platte on January 1 2025 in r/rust.

Who are the people maintaining the project? Is there any official "axum team" or "axum organization"?

When looking around I found this GitHub Discussion breaking down the current(?) list of maintainers. Do the maintainers form an "axum team" or "axum organization" in any official capacity?

How is the axum framework being backed and by whom?

Do the maintainers of the framework receive any financial backing to continue maintaining or is all maintenance fully voluntary? Is there any big organization which has decided to back the project in some way?

[jplatte]

What is axum's affiliation with the tokio team?

I guess what I can add to my reddit comment is that I really don't know anything of why axum started as a Tokio project (or maybe I once asked David but I forgot.. 😅). I know David Pedersen started the project before I knew about it, and it has been part of the Tokio org since before I started contributing I'm pretty sure.

Who are the people maintaining the project?

Since I posted that GH discussion, I added two more collaborators (people with write permission) to the repo. See #3431 (comment).

Is there any official "axum team" or "axum organization"?

No. There's the repo collaborators, and a smaller set of people who are allowed to publish the axum crates on crates.io (the tokio-rs/axum-release GitHub "team"). I don't intend to disclose who exactly is in this group.

How is the axum framework being backed and by whom?

Out of my three GitHub sponsors, I know that two sponsor me for other reasons. One ($1 / month) may be sponsoring me (in part) due to my work on axum. I'm not aware of any of the other maintainers receiving financial backing.