Comment by deanCommie

I really don't understand this argument. Why do you think Facebook and Google have so many open source contributions? Is it really out of the goodness of their hearts? Or is it because that was part of their DELIBERATE STRATEGY to attract talent and use OSS as part of marketing outreach.

Microsoft's core business is developer tooling. In the 90's and early 2000's that could be closed-source and proprietary. By the 2010s it was clear that the only way to operate with the kind of tools they have is to be open source, so they pivoted. But their goal is still business.

Google built Kubernetes as a platform play to compete with AWS and Azure - brilliantly - by feeding engineer fears about "lock-in", giving them a set of tools that they could justify feeling "free", and then when the engineers invariably said "this is too complicated to build, maintain, and operate" they turned around and sold a GCP managed kubernetes solution! After all, who better to operate Kubernetes than the team that built it, amirite?

Android is the same play just competing with closed-source iOS instead of AWS.

Facebook built GraphQL for developers on THEIR Platform.

Apple built Swift for developers on THEIR platform.

Examples like this are just as cynical and capitalistic profit-driven as AWS "open sourcing" an SDK for interacting with AWS.