There is a good point about fulltime, and nothing specific to either go or google. Lots of opensource projects get by largely on the evenings-and-weekends cont

There is a good point about fulltime, and nothing specific to either go or google. Lots of opensource projects get by largely on the evenings-and-weekends contributions of a (often small) number of contributors. Sometimes managing to find resources for a full time person or two at the core. There are a ton of great, productive engineers out there. Some of them contribute across a number of projects in their "spare" time. It's easy to understate the impact even a small, mostly full time (or at least solidly part-time) team can make on a project. Any company willing to put it's money where its proverbial mouth is like this can easily start to significantly affect the direction of all but the largest OS projects. You don't have to be google sized, you just have to effectively vote with hours (e.g. $) spent. The governance model of the project may help or hinder this to some degree, but in the end results speak (or a fork is likely).