Comment Reflections on Rusting Trust (Score 1) 67
The main reason that people worried about a spec in the past was to avoid vendor lock-in. An implementation which is available under a public license is a good solution to that problem also.
Even apart from costs associated with proprietary software, the other reason to avoid vendor lock-in is to avoid self-propagating backdoors in the compiler. Ken Thompson described how to make such a backdoor with C in his 1983 "Reflections on Trusting Trust" speech. David A. Wheeler described "diverse double-compiling", a defense against compiler backdoors that relies on the existence of independent implementations of a language. Stable Rust doesn't have that because it's such a moving target, with widely used programs relying on language and library features less than half a year old.
See also "Reflections on Rusting Trust" by Manish Goregaokar