Programming

Just to play the Devil’s Advocate here.

FLOSS is provably insufficient as a token of certainty for longevity and fairness. Licenses can change — we’ve seen this with MongoDB, and even Terraform. Sure, you can fork them, but who’s to say if the ecosystem will follow suit? Most of the time, the ecosystem doesn’t move to the new FLOSS fork.

And I don’t think C# is a good example. C# runs on .NET, which is Microsoft’s own framework. TS compiles to JS (technically ECMAScript) and runs on V8, both of which aren’t “owned” by Microsoft. There’s ample room for Microsoft to take advantage of the popularity of TS to wedge their influence into the ECMAScript standard and the V8 engine, e.g. by extending TS with features not available or performant in JS, pull themselves ahead of the rest, and become the de facto standard. It’s a common playbook by large tech companies — Amazon takes FOSS projects, modify them, and put them up as services on AWS and eventually gain significant market share and influence; Google is doing something similar with the Web API Standards.