Why was it a problem that Mozilla was heavily involved in Rust?
As an outsider, I felt that Mozilla lend credibility to Rusts efforts, and Rust gave Mozilla relevance.
As an outsider, I felt that Mozilla lend credibility to Rusts efforts, and Rust gave Mozilla relevance.
Even though Mozilla was pretty hands-off from Rust, management wise, one thing being in control of something like this just has a lot of effects. I'm not really prepared to go into a full retro of Mozilla's involvement with Rust here, I just wanted to note that there was also a lot of good there.
There's also the "if the company goes evil the project may also be affected", like Red Hat pulling the carpet under CentOS or many other examples.
Guess which FAANG company has de facto control of the foundation now? I'll give you two hints: it starts with A and isn't Apple.
Also, without a generous benefactor, open source languages have to scrape funding together piecemeal from different sources. For example, both Rust and Go have had (or still have) dedicated staff writing documentation for the language. This is a luxury that other languages (e.g. Nim or Crystal) cannot fund or afford.
All languages want to attract developers and a key question is: how can languages without a big corporate benefactor attract funding to help grow the language and build related libraries?
That problem is fundamental. As soon as one entity gets too much control, it's impossible to wrest control back without their agreement, or a long protracted battle which will hurt the thing being fought over.
Nobody is saying keep corporate interests completely divorced, this is just a call to be aware that one interest is getting too much power, whether on purpose or just through increased interest on their part, but the end result is the same. If we care about Rust not being beholden to one entity at the expense of others, then action should be taken now (even if that action is just much increased scrutiny and asking Amazon to please make sure the executive directory position is filled ASAP, and not with someone Amazon affiliated).
RIP.
And apparently that couldn't change until Rust went off on its independent journey.