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The Rust programming language now has its own foundation and no longer relies on Mozilla.

Programming language Rust has declared its independence from Mozilla. The Rust Foundation, an independent organization, will now support the language and those who use it.

Mozilla, the makers of the popular Firefox web browser, has banded together with some of the world’s biggest tech giants to launch the Rust Foundation. On February 8, they announced the new foundation and wished Rust godspeed.

Rust was born at Mozilla as a safer alternative to C and C++. Now it has become one of the most popular languages for system development. This is despite the fact that not many use it for application development.

Mozilla, Microsoft and others hop on the Rust Foundation bandwagon

Daniel Nazer, Senior IP & Product Counsel at Mozilla, expressed the company;s enthusiasm in a Mozilla Blog post. “Rust has long been bigger than just a Mozilla project and today’s announcement is the culmination of many years of community building and collaboration,” he wrote.

“Mozilla is pleased to be a founding Platinum Sponsor of the Rust Foundation,” he writes. He adds that Mozilla now “looks forward to working with it to help Rust continue to grow and prosper.”

Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have also joined the non-profit foundation as its founding members.

A smooth transition for Rust users

Ashley Williams, Interim Executive Director of the Rush Foundation, assured Rust users in her own blog post .

“Mozilla, the original home of the Rust project, has transferred all trademark and infrastructure assets…to the Rust Foundation,” she writes.

“We’re filled with gratitude for Mozilla whose thoughtful incubation of the project from its inception as a research project in 2010, to establishing independent governance with the 1.0 release in 2015, has led us to this moment, as we set out as a fully independent organization,” she adds.

“Without their support,” Williams writes, “we wouldn’t find ourselves in the position we do today.”