IDK I think this is overblown. Amazon employs two core members of Rust leadership. Both of whom worked hard on making Rust amazing like few others did. Both of whom who joined Mozilla to work on amazing projects for wages below what different places in the industry would pay. Do such people really betray their project of passion for money? Note that joining Amazon alone is no such act. It's joining Amazon and then becoming a heavy lobbyist for whatever Amazon wants to do with the language.
Also note that leaders of teams don't have many special rights. They are more primus inter pares than bosses. This doesn't mean that people don't listen to them, but it's more informal and due to respect of the individual from what I can see. Respect that they'd lose if they supported some crazy Amazon idea that is harmful for the language.
As for core team vs foundation issues. I share concerns voiced in the community that the foundation is intransparent. But ultimately, the core team as well as the foundation don't do day to day operation of the language.
Maybe Steve sees something that I don't, and he's certainly in a better position to see things, but I don't see much of a threat, at least not right now.
I meant it in the sense that it's not happening. But that if it happened, I'd be more worried. I think it would also fail.
The mere act of taking money, and Amazon presumably pays them a lot, is not immoral.
It only starts to be a problem if larger percentages of the teams work at Amazon, and people would be put onto teams just for being employed at Amazon. Linus Torvalds has made it clear that he doesn't make people maintainers for some component just for being employed somewhere. Instead of being bound to a company, maintainership is bound to the person. I think this is a good policy and one that Rust should keep.
I don't think there has been any evidence of this. But I've seen some complaints that development of Rust is becoming somewhat less transparent and less deliberation-driven; it can be somewhat harder for community members outside of the teams proper to provide appropriate input. This is only a very slight concern so far, but it makes the risk of 'lobbying' behavior a bit higher.
I'd rather not put words in anyone's mouth, sorry! It's not like it even matters all that much, it's something that individual project teams could easily fix by improving and standardizing on how to more consistently seek outside community input on new developments (leveraging, e.g. the public 'internals' forum, and/or the RFC github repo). This was not needed before since the core team was picking up a lot of that slack. But obviously we've been seeing some changes wrt. that.
The individual sub-teams have been using RFCs as the way to push through major changes for years and years and years. Pretty much since the sub-teams were born, around when Rust 1.0 was released in 2015. Nothing has changed there. I know because I was there in the beginning and I'm still here.
What has changed since the beginning is that there are more working groups these days. For example, there are working groups specializing in SIMD and error handling, among many others (they just happen to be the ones I follow in particular). The working groups generally work toward writing an RFC for the broader community to give feedback on. But working groups themselves are open to anyone, and they aren't difficult to join. (And you don't even need to "join" to participate. You just have to show up and start giving feedback.) The key point here is that the RFC process is still used, same as it always has been.
To be clear, working groups and the Rust teams choose their own membership. Neither Amazon nor the Rust Foundation have any say.
Also note that leaders of teams don't have many special rights. They are more primus inter pares than bosses. This doesn't mean that people don't listen to them, but it's more informal and due to respect of the individual from what I can see. Respect that they'd lose if they supported some crazy Amazon idea that is harmful for the language.
As for core team vs foundation issues. I share concerns voiced in the community that the foundation is intransparent. But ultimately, the core team as well as the foundation don't do day to day operation of the language.
Maybe Steve sees something that I don't, and he's certainly in a better position to see things, but I don't see much of a threat, at least not right now.