Thread by @lzsthw

A few people have asked what the impact of Amazon controlling Rust could be to the language? Surely Amazon wouldn't kill off the language since they're using it, and Rust is pretty solid now so what could Amazon possibly do?

Let's look at some history in similar situations:

XML - Microsoft bought people on the XML steering committee and famously steered it in a direction that supported *their* Enterprise ambitions like SOAP. Any feature that threatened to give another company an advantage or *cost them money* was probably fought.

JavaScript -- Netscape was famous for being written in this weirdo XML/XUL/C++/JavaScript monstrosity code base, so it's no wonder that while Netscape dominated the internet JavaScript stagnated. Any feature that cost Mozilla money updating XUL was shut down.

Unix -- The history of the POSIX standard is also full of this kind of "control to reduce costs and push first mover advantage" strategy. Companies push *their* implementation of things so they have the first correct version, and shutdown any proposed feature that costs money.

Go -- Google famously pushed *their* version of packages/modules onto everyone because that's what they'd already made and been using. It would cost them money to use a different one, and pushing it would mean they have first mover advantage over competitors.

Based on this, I predict that Amazon will use their purchase of controlling interests to do two things:

1. Push features that save/make them money.
2. Block features that cost them money.

There's a few ways this will go down within the community:

First, if a proposed feature could potentially cost them money it'll get shamed and shouted down by the sock puppets, but, the sock puppets will pretend that it's just because of their "expertise" and not because Amazon said "Make It So".

Second, if a proposed feature gives a competitor an advantage it'll get shutdown. Let's say Microsoft proposes a thread model that boosts performance 100%. Amazon will stop it because MS clearly already uses it, so blocking would cost MS money in rewrites and supporting it.

Third, you'll see the sock puppets use Rust's famously progressive politics and secret moderation police to block any criticism of Amazon. Go famously blocked someone who criticized their code for saying "halfassed" because it has "ass" in it. You'll see that too with Amazon.

In short, Amazon won't destroy Rust, but they will stagnate it and push features that are completely irrelevant to the community. Nobody will be able to stop this because Rust doesn't have universal suffrage, so they just don't have any say anyway.

That's why Amazon loves Rust.