Not the original commenter, but from hearing Joe Armstrong speak on multiple occasions my recollection is that Erlang was blacklisted for some length of time (which allowed it to become an open source language), but eventually the company realized it still offered significant value.

I posted an excerpt in a different comment, but a decent source for this is section 5.2 of the document:

https://lfe.io/papers/%5B2007%5D%20Armstrong%20-%20HOPL%20II...