There's not a lot of material to directly address here other than to congratulate Zig and its team for trying to chart a path that is both practical and principled. But yet the post touches on a dozen or so issues that one can commiserate with.
One is the notion that future stewards of a project may diverge from the vision of the founders. But this is unsolvable, unless you try to force them (with some combination of blunt and imperfect tools, such as licenses, patents, secrets, shame, money, power) or outlive them (as a chartered foundation, since humans do not live indefinitely). Instead, it's far better to rely on accidental ossification, where your work becomes so widespread and popular that some ancient subset of it becomes commonplace and impractical to fully displace by a future actor, friendly or otherwise. This sounds like sarcasm, but, it's thoroughly difficult to entirely displace C, Bourne shell, vi, grep, zip and deflate, TCP, HTTP... mostly-compatible independent implementations proliferate over time, but many of the design choices of the original creators nonetheless live on.
Another is the realization that for many startups, "open source" (in ironic quotes) is a recruitment/marketing/discoverability strategy rather than a genuine ideological stance. It's a way to get the attention of hip developers, and a way to hook people in a crowded landscape to try before they (or, more properly, their flush-with-cash company) buys, maybe 3-5 years down the road. And I can't fault people for wanting to get paid, but it's blatantly obvious that most of the open source products we all remember from the last 10 years have just been trying to do the plan of "1. give away, 2. ???, 3. PROFIT!". It's hard to feel sorry for them when a competent and well-known vendor comes along and offers a managed service of the open source thing, and they're left holding the bag.
One weird thing about the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit is that it made it obvious that mindshare and familiarity are almost mental pre-requisites of compatibility, even when the achieved compatibility is only partial. Clearly, Android was not the Java Platform, but yet a bazillion Java libraries worked anyway, and a bazillion programmers could pick up Java from a hodgepodge tutorial and crank out apps onto smartphones. In the end, this "programmer compatibility" was as key to Android's success as the fact that if you wanted to milk the gold rush of $1 games with ads, your only other comparable platform was Apple, who required you to own an expensive Mac. If they chose C++ or a brand-new language like (later) Dart, the barrier to entry would have been higher. In the end, everything boils down to "barrier to entry".
If Zig achieves lasting relevance, it's unlikely that the design vision of its founders will be invalidated in the future. But getting to that future is far from easy.
Thank you for sharing, I think you raise some good points.
With regards to the OSS point, I am forced to lash at both Redis Labs and AWS every time I want to say something about Redis to avoid easy exploitation of my words by either party, but I think the problem with open source goes much deeper than what companies like Redis Labs are doing.
AWS is in many ways being a good OSS citizen, and yet it too has devastating effects on a lot of OSS projects and not just because of conflicting business models.
One is the notion that future stewards of a project may diverge from the vision of the founders. But this is unsolvable, unless you try to force them (with some combination of blunt and imperfect tools, such as licenses, patents, secrets, shame, money, power) or outlive them (as a chartered foundation, since humans do not live indefinitely). Instead, it's far better to rely on accidental ossification, where your work becomes so widespread and popular that some ancient subset of it becomes commonplace and impractical to fully displace by a future actor, friendly or otherwise. This sounds like sarcasm, but, it's thoroughly difficult to entirely displace C, Bourne shell, vi, grep, zip and deflate, TCP, HTTP... mostly-compatible independent implementations proliferate over time, but many of the design choices of the original creators nonetheless live on.
Another is the realization that for many startups, "open source" (in ironic quotes) is a recruitment/marketing/discoverability strategy rather than a genuine ideological stance. It's a way to get the attention of hip developers, and a way to hook people in a crowded landscape to try before they (or, more properly, their flush-with-cash company) buys, maybe 3-5 years down the road. And I can't fault people for wanting to get paid, but it's blatantly obvious that most of the open source products we all remember from the last 10 years have just been trying to do the plan of "1. give away, 2. ???, 3. PROFIT!". It's hard to feel sorry for them when a competent and well-known vendor comes along and offers a managed service of the open source thing, and they're left holding the bag.
One weird thing about the Oracle vs. Google lawsuit is that it made it obvious that mindshare and familiarity are almost mental pre-requisites of compatibility, even when the achieved compatibility is only partial. Clearly, Android was not the Java Platform, but yet a bazillion Java libraries worked anyway, and a bazillion programmers could pick up Java from a hodgepodge tutorial and crank out apps onto smartphones. In the end, this "programmer compatibility" was as key to Android's success as the fact that if you wanted to milk the gold rush of $1 games with ads, your only other comparable platform was Apple, who required you to own an expensive Mac. If they chose C++ or a brand-new language like (later) Dart, the barrier to entry would have been higher. In the end, everything boils down to "barrier to entry".
If Zig achieves lasting relevance, it's unlikely that the design vision of its founders will be invalidated in the future. But getting to that future is far from easy.