Disclosure: I’m one of the founders of ferrous, though I’m the one with practically no involvement in the Rust community.
To be quite honest here: Ferrous is a for-profit endeavor, but my co-founders and most of our employees both have been involved in the rust community for a long time. We’re also sponsoring conferences, speakers, open source projects in the rust space since the beginning, for example rust-analyzer (1)
So yes, we intend to find funding, people working on this need to be paid. People doing the organizational legwork (such as running the company, keeping the office tidy, making sure there’s enough coffee) need to be paid. Standards documents need to be paid. This isn’t something we as a 6-people company can self-fund. But we intend to make as much of this open source as possible. If there’s sufficient funding, all of it.
On the other side, we’ve been at embedded conferences (even before ferrous as a company was a thing), talking to people in the automobile, robotics and aerospace sector and the question of “is this certified/certifiable” has come up quite a few times. There’s definite interest in finding a replacement for C in that space, and that’s where rust could shine. It’s certainly early, but this is not a project that will come to fruition in the short run. It’s something that rust could profit from in a decade.
(1) https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer/blob/master/R...