I really don't see how it could have gone any differently.
Mozilla is struggling. Firefox's market share is less than 3%, in the "also ran" category. Employing all the people in the Silicon Valley to maintain Rust is hugely expensive without an obvious return on financial investment.
By opening Rust up to the community, they ensured its popularity and longevity beyond what more corporate-focused languages (Go, Swift, or C#) can achieve. Relinquishing control is exactly what Rust needed to help its popularity.
Certainly not having a bunch of engineers employed specifically to develop and maintain Rust hurts, but Mozilla simply cannot afford it.
Successful programming languages tend to be bad for business: they generate support costs but little or no measurable income.
The only way to make them profitable is to use them as a lock-in tool for your platform (VB, .Net, SQL dialects...), but Mozilla never had anything to lock people in.
> Relinquishing control is exactly what Rust needed to help its popularity.
Maybe? But that's not why they did it. In the same year that their CEO took another massive payout they laid off tons of staff "because covid", an excuse that was obviously nonsense at the time but especially looks like nonsense when you realize that tech absolutely exploded during covid with record high valuations.
Mozilla absolutely could have afforded it. Easily.
Mozilla's CEO is an absolutely disaster and the company is never going to be able to recover from it.
Mozilla is struggling. Firefox's market share is less than 3%, in the "also ran" category. Employing all the people in the Silicon Valley to maintain Rust is hugely expensive without an obvious return on financial investment.
By opening Rust up to the community, they ensured its popularity and longevity beyond what more corporate-focused languages (Go, Swift, or C#) can achieve. Relinquishing control is exactly what Rust needed to help its popularity.
Certainly not having a bunch of engineers employed specifically to develop and maintain Rust hurts, but Mozilla simply cannot afford it.