Why are big tech companies questionable when sponsoring a project like Rust? Do they not also have a vested interest in making sure Rust is maintained and used? The recent corprotisation of Rust can’t be attributed to big tech companies (at least not alone and not majoritvely) since big tech also sponsor and fund many, if not most, big free open source projects. This is a phenomenom seemingly unique to Rust. The linux foundation has the same, if not more, massive corporate sponsors and doesn’t face the same problems. I want to know what is going on at Rust to cause these changes.
Good point. I agree that decentralization is preferred. But I suspect that these massive tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google and the like) have enough money laying around that they think to give an open source project a decent amount of funding may cost them relatively little, but could give them a better reputation around the wide pool of talented developers whom they hope to employ.
Obviously, this will still generate profit for them, as better developers will produce better end products, but I don’t think it’s as malicious as it could be.
And obviously we wouldn’t want large monopolies to control any critical infrastructure. Oracle is bad enough.