Actually there are relatively few real (TM) open source projects driven by the community, at least if you look at important projects. Many open source projects are just commercial projects driven mainly by a single company. Look for example at Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and Elasticsearch. They follow exactly the model described in the article. Technologies like these could have been developed by a community, too, but it is hard to form such a community and keep it alive.

For a community-driven project from the size of a database some serious sponsors would be needed. Good examples are Rust, Linux, and PostgreSQL. I wonder why so many companies are happily paying Oracle (and the likes) tons of money instead of sponsoring an open source project like PostgreSQL.

I'm curious what the distinction is between Rust (driven by Mozilla) and Go (driven by Google).

Rust has largely broken out of Mozilla already. If it can maintain its growth rate (not guaranteed, but so far so good) it will have a future. Check back in five years.

It's a very different language than Golang though, very expressive, generics, no GC, etc.

You say that like those are bad things.

Yes, the borrow checker is a PITA vs. Go, but there are compensations.

These are not bad things if you’re writing system code.

Is there ever a plan for GC?

[1]: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc [2]: https://github.com/withoutboats/shifgrethor