Well, I'm not even necessarily trying to soap box here about open source or free software per se—I do think commercial/proprietary research has value to society as a whole, albeit less value. For instance, take Big Table—enormously influential and, I think, beneficial to society in spite of being largely closed off to the public. However, rust is way better for everyone, and I find it shocking it came from such a relatively small organization.
It doesn't really matter that Mozilla's a small organization. All they had to do was provide strong leadership and management expertise, and entice the open source community to voluntarily join and advance the project accordingly. Which thereby lead to not just Mozilla, but a few other organizations joining in with developers of their own to collaborate together amongst each other, including an army of rogue volunteers that aren't backed by any organizations. That's just not something you'll ever see from a corporation that has to answer to greedy shareholders that only care about ROI figures, especially short-term ROI figures.
