I don’t think I’m getting the connection here —- Rust was incubated at Mozilla and is now managed by its own open-source foundation. There’s nothing particularly closed or “walled garden” about it.

By contrast, Apple’s ecosystem is the canonical example of a walled garden. But it’s overwhelmingly programmed in unsafe languages (C, C++, and Objective-C). So what gives?

> It's not hard to see where things are going if you read between the lines. Increasingly, "safety and security" is being used to exert control over the population and destroy freedom

This is an eye-poppingly confusing confabulation: in what world am I any less free because the programs I write and use have fewer trivial vulnerabilities in them? What freedom, exactly, have I lost by choosing to crash less?

You bring up the GNU project; their background is explicitly rooted in Lisp: one of the very first safe, managed languages. The unsafety and comparative messiness of C is one of their standard bugbears. That hasn’t stopped their message of political and software freedom, as you’ve pointed out.

That's only true to a point. Many mistakes are costly, and those costs are often born by other people. So it's reasonable to have protection against mistakes, for the benefit of both the person who would make them and the other people that they would affect.

When it comes to computer security in particular, an easily compromised personal computer can be devastating to the livelihood of the person whose computer was compromised through no fault of their own (remember, most people don't know anything about computer security, and they shouldn't have to), and can also harm others, e.g. if the computer becomes part of a botnet. If that computer is part of an organization, then the mistake made by a programmer can affect the ability of that organization to provide important, even essential, services. This is what's driving the increased focus on safety in this context.

I realize we're drowning in cynicism these days, and it's tempting to think that it's all an evil conspiracy to take away our freedom so a few people can make more money or have more power. Such a narrative resonates with something primal in us that's reinforced by the sort of simplistic good versus evil stories that make up so much of our entertainment. Reality is messier, more nuanced, and not as neatly connected as our puny pattern-seeking brains would prefer.

Plenty of people knew what RMS was talking about.

But GPL was very bad for business, said those there were against it, so the new world of shareware and public domain is here again.