> For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain.
This is provably false and wish that sentiment would die
Microsoft spends at least $600-$800 million on open source The make VS Code, .NET/C#, Edge, TypeScript. They provide free hosting, free CIs, free issues, discussions, free webpages (github). Google spends similar amounts on Chromium, Angular, Go, Flutter, Gemma, etc...
Meta spends similar amounts on React, PyTorch, Presto, Llama
Amazon sends 200-300 million on valkey, OpenSearch, FireCracker, and has dedicated engineers for Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Rust
Apple provide swift, WebKit, Clang/LLVM - there spending is also in the 100-200 million range.
That's on top of employees at almost all of those companies fixing bugs and providing patches for everything they use.
People make up the claims like the OP with zero actual evidence.
All of those companies have very compelling reasons to provide those tools for free, as in (most importantly dor adoption) no money asked and (less importantly) open source. They make money because of the number of people using those tools. They are a bridge head into controlling their own share of the market.
The OP is saying companies are operating on the myth that open source is free. No, they are not operating in my myth its free. Spending hundreds of millions a year is not "operating on the myth that open source is free". Spending 0 would be
This is provably false and wish that sentiment would die
Microsoft spends at least $600-$800 million on open source The make VS Code, .NET/C#, Edge, TypeScript. They provide free hosting, free CIs, free issues, discussions, free webpages (github). Google spends similar amounts on Chromium, Angular, Go, Flutter, Gemma, etc...
Meta spends similar amounts on React, PyTorch, Presto, Llama
Amazon sends 200-300 million on valkey, OpenSearch, FireCracker, and has dedicated engineers for Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Rust
Apple provide swift, WebKit, Clang/LLVM - there spending is also in the 100-200 million range.
That's on top of employees at almost all of those companies fixing bugs and providing patches for everything they use.
People make up the claims like the OP with zero actual evidence.