Technology

Thats definitely one of the reasons Mozilla is developing rust, but not the only one. The goal of Rust is to make it harder to write insecure code. That requires more upfront work for the coder, and can be less efficient with computer resources, but provides more peace of mind that the finished product doesn’t have as many bugs. Thats a trade off Mozilla and Rust users think is worthwhile, but not everyone agrees with that.

In terms of vendor lock-in from language choice, it’s a big fat It Depends™ lol. Theres a ton of money in big tech, so there are a lot of clever people who work full time trying to lock you onto platforms without it looking to you like you’re falling into their trap, and they use a myriad of tools.

It is rare, but not unheard of for there to be license fees just for using a language like you said. (And sometimes there is even disagreement about who gets to charge licensing fees for a language: See the Java debacle with Google v. Oracle.) However typically the issue is more around being able to use the new features of a platform when a vendor introduces them. For example, Apple really wants you to use Swift to write iPhone apps. You can use alternatives, but then when Apple introduces the new iWiping feature that revolutionizes buttholes, you won’t be able to provide that feature to your users until your language of choice gets updated to support iWipes. That could take a year and means your app is behind your competitor, who just used Swift so Apple made sure they could support iWipes on the day the feature came out.

Another extremely common example is that entire businesses are run through complicated formulas in Excel spreadsheets. Sure, there are many other ways to run a business and keep track of the numbers, but most people start small and then the complexity of their spreadsheets just grows and grows and grows. Those people will be forever stuck paying for an excel subscription (that didn’t even used to be a subscription when the business started, but now it is for some reason!) because the complexity of replacing everything is scary.