As others pointed out, it’s not clear who will do the rewrites. Based on the curl example, it might be the maintainers. It would have been great if they could state that concretely.
I’m also wondering why there’s a middle man instead of funding the projects directly, but that’s another story.
I'm the head of ISRG, the "middle man" entity you're referring to.
We have a memory safety initiative in which we plan and fund projects to move popular open source software to memory safe languages. For each plan we make we seek a funder - in a couple of cases now that has been Google, but it may be others in the future.
We are in the "middle" of the financing in the sense that funding passes through us, but the memory safety initiative is coordinated primarily by us. We select projects and work with maintainers to make plans. Part of that coordination we perform is matching up projects with funders like Google, and then managing the contracts and overseeing the work to completion.
If I understand correctly, this is an initiative that might have multiple sponsors, so it makes sense to have a central entity organizing it, and following up with all the projects involved. This makes perfect sense to me now.
Also, I was not aware that your org is behind Let’s Encrypt. This puts things into a very positive light.
It might make sense to post a sibling blog post/announcement to explain what this project is about and how it would work. I feel that Google’s post left a lot of questions to be answered.
If you don’t mind me asking, is rust the only language that you have in mind? Would go work as well?
As others pointed out, it’s not clear who will do the rewrites. Based on the curl example, it might be the maintainers. It would have been great if they could state that concretely.
I’m also wondering why there’s a middle man instead of funding the projects directly, but that’s another story.