Comment by Retr0spectrum
9 years ago
Are there any examples where a company contributes to Open Source software, without any (direct or indirect) benefit to themselves?
What difference does it make anyway?
9 years ago
Are there any examples where a company contributes to Open Source software, without any (direct or indirect) benefit to themselves?
What difference does it make anyway?
I think akerro is asking about the motivation for Microsoft's contributions to OSS, rather than whether they benefit from it (clearly they do).
My impression, having spoken to people from Microsoft involved in OSS, is that they are pretty much entirely driven by what will make them the most profit. Sometimes that means making software "open source" and accepting contributions from the public (free labour!), other times that means keeping their software proprietary. They don't seem to care about ethics, or software freedom. It's a shame, but Microsoft aren't the only ones with that mentality. Big businesses are, more often than not, primarily motivated by profit.
So are most for profit open source based companies. Redhat development is probably solely based on profit to.
Yes it does make a difference.
There is always some direct or indirect benefit, but it conts more when community is involved in development of OSS supported by corporation, like GSoC, where actual community is paid to work on selected projects, Clang, where Apple tried to reach consensus with GNU, BSD, Mozilla which creates a lot of fun stuff like Rust and Servo, their full MozLabs and WebOfThings, DuckDuckGo.