Say what you want, but the problem here is that you don't need to give board seats to those who have tons of cash, rather instead have them sponsor it, like how the R foundation has done.
Facebook essentially bought a board seat to drive and prioritise which features they want in the development of Rust.
The wolf eats the same grass as the sheep and gets praise for it.
The foundation is not involved in feature development, so this doesn't make a ton of sense.
it doesn't make sense to spend a ton of money on a seat and not do anything. I am sure facebook has other motives than paying engineers to work on rust.
a regular sponsorship would have a been more enough in this case.
The foundation's stated mission is to steward the intellectual property of the Rust project, and assist it and its maintainers. That often means things like "paying for legal support" and "paying for CI" and such.
The Rust project is the thing that's existed for years, and makes all of the decisions about what happens to Rust technically. The foundation has no position in that hierarchy, and sponsoring the foundation does not get you a seat on the teams that accept RFCs.
> a regular sponsorship would have a been more enough in this case.
I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing here between "regular" and not. Maybe that they would only want a lower tier sponsorship? I don't know, you'd have to ask them.