The author specifically calls out Google/Go, Apple/Swift and Microsoft/C#, around tools that do compilation and package management spying on you. It's worth not

The author specifically calls out Google/Go, Apple/Swift and Microsoft/C#, around tools that do compilation and package management spying on you. It's worth noting that this potential exists in both corporate-controlled and non-corporate-controlled languages, but ... have there actually been any incidents of Go/Swift/C# doing anything sketchy here? IMO this argument needs specifics, because non-corporate projects can do the exact same thing. The other concern is: > Using java for free software was the first misstep. We were warned against it but ignored those warnings. Much later the oracle/google battle showed how precarious it is to build on languages controlled by corporations. There's certainly an argument there, but it also happens with non-corporate open source. To give an example: - Scala (programming language) was released in 2004, as a non-corporate open-source project - Play (web app framework for Scala and Java) was released in 2007, as a non-corporate open-source project - Akka (actor system lib for Scala and Java) was released in 2010, as a non-corporate open-source project - Key people in these projects form Typesafe (now Lightbend) in 2011. A company that provides premium support and tools around open-source projects, largely centred around Scala/Play/Akka - A few months ago, in 2022, Lightbend changed the Akka licence, made it proprietary ("Business Source Licence") and very expensive at large scale Software that starts out as more "pure", non-corporate open-source can still turn the tables on you and charge large licensing fees later. But at least if it's open source from the start, it can be forked, e.g. for Akka, there's this Apache fork that was started after Akka changed its licence: https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko https://github.com/apache/incubator-pekko . This is the key open source protection, and it's true for both corporate and non-corporate projects - if the maintainers start doing things people disagree with, anyone can just fork it.