I’m not saying it was all terrible nor that Go is managed better. But whenever there is a conversation about Go on HN people get so caught up in their own snobbery about how terrible they perceive Go to be that they lose all touch with reality.
The fact remains a language backed by a company is far less likely to die into insignificance than a language that isn’t. This is because it takes a lot for a language to gain momentum. You have a bit of a chicken and egg problem where developers won’t use a language without a good ecosystem, frameworks and community. But people aren’t going to write that if there aren’t already developers using it. This is where corporate sponsorship really helps.
Thankfully there are a plethora of good languages out there you can choose from. If you don’t like the direction of one language then you can use another. Or, alternatively, since Java, C# and Go all have open source compilers, you could fork and build your own community.
If you have a contractual obligation that requires to exactly use a specific version of C/C++, then you'll need to pay money for the actual specification. In pretty much any other situation, the drafts are sufficient and perhaps even better (because they will have incorporated some errata).
I'm sure you were perfectly aware of it, but C and C++ working drafts are almost identical (I think? Never bought an ISO version), and available for free from open-std.org. For example, http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/standards
Now they are driven by ISO Standards bodies, with many, many participants -- ATT not among them anymore, to my knowledge. Even in 1995 ATT had nothing approaching veto power.
My remarks lumping Java in with C# and Swift are transparent wishful thinking.