IIRC it's open-source with a fairly wide set of contributors, with Mozilla being a major one, rather than Mozilla being the "owners" of Rust.
Not arguing your point, and there's a chance I'm awfully wrong, but as I recall it, Mozilla are more the champions of the language rather than the owner of it.
Regardless, it's a really neat language
What is the extent of support from mozilla? I can't find a list of other corporate sponsors?
Some other companies do sponsor work at times as well. A recent hot topic of discussion is “does a Rust foundation make sense”, there are good arguments for and against. We’ll see.
Oh, and note that that number is people who are decision makers in the project; about 120~150 distinct people contribute to each six-week release. We’ve had 2786 distinct people contribute. And that’s only to rust-lang/rust; not Cargo, not any of the libraries the team maintains, not any of the other kinds of work that doesn’t produce a commit.
To put this into more context: a lot of the code shipped with the Rust toolchain does not live in rust-lang/rust.
Some parts of the standard library (HashMap, HashSet, C FFI, intrinsics, etc.) are used as dependencies. All of the tools (the linter, language server, rustfmt, rustup, cargo, etc.) are dependencies. Many compiler components like miri (constant evaluator), chalk (type queries), polonius (borrow checking), etc. are also dependencies. The Cranelift code generation backend can be dynamically used and does not live in rust-lang/rust, etc. Then there is the RFC repository, and probably other things.
Counting contributors for such a distributed infrastructure isn't easy, but the number of contributors to rust-lang/rust isn't super meaningful.
One might be able to do better by finding commits to rust-lang/rust that update "Rust" submodules (e.g. not LLVM), and adding the contributors to those repos from the last update. One might also want to find commits that update versions of rust-lang/rust dependencies, and for those that live in the rust project (or that have dependencies there), count the contributors from the last version, etc.
The Rust project has seen significant modularization over the last couple of years, and the more modular it gets, the less meaningful "contributors to rust-lang/rust" becomes, and the less accurate the "Thanks!" pages of each release become.
So glad to see this sentiment echoed somewhere outside my own head/conversations. Rust is a game changer, it brings something novel (ownership/borrowing, research-grade type system) to systems programming, and it brings great features for high level programming (type inference, strict control, high level abstraction support, "zero-cost" abstractions), and is basically a paragon of good open-source development in the open.
On top of all of that it's done by Mozilla, with so much less resources than other companies, and a demonstrated interest in making software that's good for everyone.