I think the history of large companies hiring maintainers/authors of programming languages/libraries they use has so far gone good. Take for example php, perl(

I think the history of large companies hiring maintainers/authors of programming languages/libraries they use has so far gone good. Take for example php, perl(booking.com, bbc, craigslist), js(fb etc). The language needs to be supported financially though. Companies are not living beings, typically its some SVP making decisions. Sometimes they do support, but sometimes big shots do feel programmers are spending too much time working for greater good, while they should be working for company profits. So it depends on the bosses you report to. There is no easy answer to this question, because many times it just comes to down to one person making decisions.