True. As an outsider I can only speculate what is going on there. As you say, other BigTech-financed projects seem fine.
About big tech companies sponsoring projects: The have an interest that Rust is maintained and many people write good crates which they can use. But they don’t care so much about the world being able to profit from the ecosystem. If they do, then just because this is actually profitable for themselves.
I think this turns into a problem once a project get mainstream. Let’s imagine that in twenty years Rust largely replaced C/C++. It would become part of the worlds critical infrastructure. I don’t think it is good to let the monopolies have the governance. I don’t believe that they act in interest of people. Often it may appear the way. But if it does, I’m convinced that there’s usually a business interest behind.
For example, screwing people completely would be bad for business or might trigger the attention of regulation bodies. So they don’t do it. Screwing people very gently such that they get used to it before they notice might happen. Slowly boiling the frog. This type of companies do that on a daily basis.
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.
True. As an outsider I can only speculate what is going on there. As you say, other BigTech-financed projects seem fine.
About big tech companies sponsoring projects: The have an interest that Rust is maintained and many people write good crates which they can use. But they don’t care so much about the world being able to profit from the ecosystem. If they do, then just because this is actually profitable for themselves.
I think this turns into a problem once a project get mainstream. Let’s imagine that in twenty years Rust largely replaced C/C++. It would become part of the worlds critical infrastructure. I don’t think it is good to let the monopolies have the governance. I don’t believe that they act in interest of people. Often it may appear the way. But if it does, I’m convinced that there’s usually a business interest behind. For example, screwing people completely would be bad for business or might trigger the attention of regulation bodies. So they don’t do it. Screwing people very gently such that they get used to it before they notice might happen. Slowly boiling the frog. This type of companies do that on a daily basis.
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.