There are two kinds of control: control via stewardship and control via contribution. Stewardship is the process of making final decisions. That could be done b

There are two kinds of control: control via stewardship and control via contribution. Stewardship is the process of making final decisions. That could be done by some foundation, but if it's the same people, the decisions would be the same. But even when the stewards make the final decisions about what goes in, someone has to contribute the work. For large/complex open source projects, much of the contribution comes from people who are paid to work full-time on the project, and someone has to pay their salary; that someone is often a corporation. Even if a corporation does not have direct control via stewardship, they can still decide what kind of contributions they're willing to pay their full-time engineers to work on. For example, Linux stewardship is done by a foundation, but most of the contribution is done by corporations. We see something similar in the Java world. Even though the Java stewards are mostly Oracle employees, Oracle does not exert direct control over stewardship; the OpenJDK lead is elected by the OpenJDK board (whose chairmanship is reserved for Oracle, but has non-Oracle members). However, Oracle also funds 90% of the OpenJDK contributors, and the company can decide they want to fund work in certain areas but not in others. E.g. Oracle has reduced investment on client-side Java; some of that work is now contributed by another corporation (Gluon), but the total resources for client work are still reduced. Because Google has many people working on OpenJDK (I think about the same number as those working on Go), it also has a lot of influence, as it can contribute large features (like the thread sanitizer they're now contributing). Here is an explanation of Java's governance by Mark Reinhold, who is the OpenJDK lead and also Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle: https://youtu.be/HpbchS5kmio https://youtu.be/HpbchS5kmio