Show me any non-corporate sponsored language that is not a toy, and is seeing serious traction. (hint - I enjoy Nim, but it's not a valid answer).

Unlike the original post implies - most of the languages in his list are corporate sponsored...

D was created at Digital Mars

Open Pascal is... an open implementation of pascal, which was created by IFIP, but most variants are dead and Borland poured a fuck load of money into turbo pascal. So both gov + corporate sponsors

Nim... is arguably not corporate sponsored, but it comes right out of open Pascal (which was) and it has trivial use at large (I still enjoy the language - I'm not about to suggest we use it at work).

Same as Zig - which is probably the closest to being a true open project in the list (IMO) but which still builds heavily on c++ tooling. (Honestly - I'm most excited about Zig, it's nice and is very close to self-hosting)

Steel bank comes right out of Carnegie Mellon (and if you don't think colleges are corporations... boy I've got news for you)

Vale... well I actually don't really know anything about this. Honestly one of the first time's I've seen it referenced at all, I'll have to look it up some time.

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So again - WTF is the author talking about?

If he just wants a free compiler (Free as in free, not as in beer) they exist for basically any large language out there.

If he wants to control language direction and goals... well - he's welcome to write his own language but otherwise I find no compelling difference between a guiding committee/creators on what he considers a "good" language, and the company making decisions for "corporate controlled" languages. If anything - at least I can usually predict what the corporate controlled languages will do, even if it's not always what I'd like...