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Alone the sponsors of the Rust Foundation I find very questionable (Amazon, Google, Huawei, Meta, Microsoft, https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ on the bottom). Unfortunately, corporatism is what you get from corporations. Happy to hear about the crab-lang fork.
I doubt the corporate sponsorship has anything to do with the recent drama in the dev team. I also think it’s a very good sign big companies are sponsoring Rust, as it shows they believe in its potential and help its adoption.
Why are big tech companies questionable when sponsoring a project like Rust? Do they not also have a vested interest in making sure Rust is maintained and used? The recent corprotisation of Rust can’t be attributed to big tech companies (at least not alone and not majoritvely) since big tech also sponsor and fund many, if not most, big free open source projects. This is a phenomenom seemingly unique to Rust. The linux foundation has the same, if not more, massive corporate sponsors and doesn’t face the same problems. I want to know what is going on at Rust to cause these changes.
True. As an outsider I can only speculate what is going on there. As you say, other BigTech-financed projects seem fine.
About big tech companies sponsoring projects: The have an interest that Rust is maintained and many people write good crates which they can use. But they don’t care so much about the world being able to profit from the ecosystem. If they do, then just because this is actually profitable for themselves.
I think this turns into a problem once a project get mainstream. Let’s imagine that in twenty years Rust largely replaced C/C++. It would become part of the worlds critical infrastructure. I don’t think it is good to let the monopolies have the governance. I don’t believe that they act in interest of people. Often it may appear the way. But if it does, I’m convinced that there’s usually a business interest behind. For example, screwing people completely would be bad for business or might trigger the attention of regulation bodies. So they don’t do it. Screwing people very gently such that they get used to it before they notice might happen. Slowly boiling the frog. This type of companies do that on a daily basis.