Who is "they"? Who is "the community"? Who qualifies for a vote and who doesn't? I never contributed any code to the Go compiler or stdlib, but have contributed to some aspects of the "wider ecosystem", including some things that see fairly broad usage, and am (coincidentally) wearing a 2018 GopherCon t-shirt as I write this. Do I qualify? Does someone who has been writing Go for a year qualify? A week? Someone who never even wrote Go code? Someone who sent in a single patch to stdlib? And how do you verify all this?
Saying "let the community vote" is easy, but if you think about it for more than a second you will realize there's tons of difficulties and that it doesn't really work. I also don't really know of any project that works like this: it's pretty always a fairly small group of "core contributors" that get to decide.
Python, Postgres, Rust..
A small amount of core contributors doesn't mean they all have to come from a single corporate entity either.
The notion that only Google could shepherd a programming language is hilarious.
I never said anything of the sort. I said that "let the community vote on who new leaders are" doesn't work. Python, PostgreSQL, and Rust don't work like that either; it's just members of a fairly small "core team" that can vote, or some variant thereof. I have no inside knowledge here, but I'll stake a good amount of money that the Go core team had a lot of discussions about this, and de-facto, it's more or less the same as having a vote – except maybe a bit less formal.
And Go would obviously be fine without Google, just as Rust was fine without Mozilla. But why bother? It's working fine as it is and Google wants to spend the money on developer salaries, so why not let them? People get far too hung up on "Google bad". I say this as someone who doesn't even have a Google account or Chrome installed.
I've worked at Google, I've used Go for about 8 years at this point and I've met a few of the key Go figures at some point. I have to say that I have _no_ idea who would be best to run the project. And neither do you.
This isn't politics where the winner gets to vanquish their enemies and make themselves and their friends and family rich. It's developing and maintaining a programming language. The only real reward you'll get is admiration IFF you do a good job. Do a crap job and you ruin the project and/or become a pariah.
I would rather have those people who make up the core leadership tell me who should run the project since they not only know the technology, but they know the people and they know how to provide continuity. Continuity and discipline is all-important.
I'd prefer it if whoever runs the project works for Google since that is where Go was born. In part for continuity reasons and that Google has proven to be a very good home for Go, but also because it is good to have direct access to an organization that has resources to support you.
