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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI is a Rust Foundation platinum level donor. They gave straight cash which can go toward paying maintainers, which is better IMO. This actually made a lot of people angry because they saw it as a risk of OpenAI gaining influence or something. Can't make everyone happy.

OpenAI also hands out free subscriptions to open source maintainers: https://developers.openai.com/community/codex-for-oss They're time limited for now, but they've been pretty generous about who gets them. Anyone who can show Rust contributions would have been able to get one before.

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I tend to disregard anyone who complains about foundational open source being funded like this. As long as the donor doesn't have dictatorial control over the product, why obsess over this?

Because not having dictatorial control doesn't protect anyone from anything; politicians take 'donations' (bribes) and then argue or enact laws for what the donor wants, no dictating involved.

Or in software terms, BigCorp sponsors you to develop an open source tool fulltime. If you make the tool more useful for them while making it more complex or worse or ignoring things for others, they might fund you next year as well. If you don't develop things that help them, they might stop and send that money elsewhere and you will need to get a normal job instead and drop your tool work to part-time. Even though they aren't dictating anything, what are you incentivised to do?

There's definitely a cost in terms of features BigCo doesn't need that get deprioritized. But that work still gets done if other people need it, it's just slower, and I don't think you could ever pull off making things worse on purpose in a big community run project like Rust.

The only times this actually happened are C++ and CORBA as far as I remember. Both of them were bureaucratic design by committee efforts from the start, the people doing it weren't users but implementors looking to stop competition, and it all happened before the open source era.

Missing C, OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, HTML 4 onwards, CSS, IP6, and so much more committe driven standards.

Can't confirm this "pretty generous", many people with lots of contributions to popular projects got any from OpenAI, not even a response to their request.

That's awesome

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