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No, Rust has been independent since Rust 1.0. Mozilla only provided free legal advice (+trademarks, etc) and employed some team members but they didn't have con

• hobofan 6y ago
  Not hard control, but I think they had a pretty big impact on where Rust headed (not in direction, but prioritization), even in the 1.x days, though more in core ecosystem than in the language itself. E.g. I doubt Rust would be in it's dominant position regarding WASM, if it weren't for Mozilla.
  • ChrisSD 6y ago
    That was only because they had engineers working on it. The foundation changes nothing in that regard. If Mozilla were to hire engineers to work on bringing Rust to a new platform then it would have the same effect now. I don't want to downplay Mozilla's many contributions to Rust in any way but I also acknowledge they worked hard to ensure Rust operated independently of any organisation, including themselves.
• staticassertion 6y ago
  I wasn't implying that Mozilla had explicit control over the project, but to say that it just "employed some team members" really undersells things. They employed critical team members, including as I recall the majority of the core team. They were also leveraging the project for R&D, allowing for fast feedback loops between core members and Servo developers. Rust always, thankfully, made sure to be independent of Mozilla, but it would be silly to think that they had no influence over the project and that by firing major contributors they've lost that.