It's open source.
Now, if the language was, say, maintained by 80% or more by submissions and monetary contributions from outside the company (and if the name was changed), then it would approach being a neutral platform to the benefit of all.
As it is, we’re all being invited into Google’s yard to play, but we don’t own the house.
They were, from the beginning, open with development, releasing early and often, and were explicit about readily accepting large contributions from outsiders (and really did so). The creators were always open to the possibility that they themselves might not be the eternal keepers of the language, which allowed competition when others developed the language further.
Contrast this with the development of the languages I mentioned. They have done the opposite of these things.
What I wrote was that I, personally, would not use Go as long as its development was perceived to be controlled and paid by Google. Forking Go would not ameliorate this in any way, unless it was successful, which would be extremely unlikely.
I mean, can anyone claim that an internal developer at, say, Microsoft or Apple could develop programs in Go and have them become used for large parts of the internal company infrastructure without it becoming politically sensitive, just as if they had chosen, say, C? Until that happens, Go is not an obviously-neutral platform, and I therefore have no desire to use it.
Since you freely admit your ignorance, can you please stop making uninformed statements that spread FUD about Go? Those of us in the Go community that invest our lives in this project don't appreciate your senseless negativity.
You also seem unusually hung up on its name. It's not like it's called Google Programming Language All Access.
A name is important, as it is a symbol. As long as the language is called “Go”, Google will always have power over it, no matter who actually does most of the work, and thus the fear will still be there. (Yes, “Go” is symbolically the same as “Google Programming Language All Access”. It’s as if Microsoft released something called “MSCode”.)
There are several projects that are free and open source, wildly available to every platform, hacked upon by hundreds of people, that still do cycle releases and development behind the back of most developers and only release full .tar.gz archives with sources after a milestone is reached.
I might be wrong but iirc bash is one of those projects (or at least was), I seem to recall people complaining about it during the shellshock issue. The GNU libc might be another but I'm not sure.
You misunderstand. The release was made from the official open source Mercurial repository, and later pushed to the official Git repository, because this release coincides with the project's migration from Mercurial to Git.
Every single change of this release was written in public, reviewed on public mailing lists, and committed to a public version control system. You are misinformed and spreading FUD. Please stop.