Igalia is a bit unique as it serves as a single corporate entity for organizing a lot of sponsored work on the Linux kernel and open source projects. You'll notice in their blog posts they have collaborations with a number of other large companies seeking to sponsor very specific development work. For example, Google works with them a lot. I think it really just simplifies a lot of logistics for paying folks to do this kind of work, plus the Igalia employees can get shared efficiency's and savings for things like benefits etc.

This isn’t explicitly called out in any of the other comments in my opinion so I’ll state this. Valve as a company is incredibly focused internally on its business. Its business is games, game hardware, and game delivery. For anything outside of that purview instead of trying to build a huge internal team they contract out. I’m genuinely curious why other companies don’t do this style more often because it seems incredibly cost effective. They hire top level contractors to do top tier work on hyper specific areas and everyone benefits. I think this kind of work is why Valve gets a free pass to do some real heinous shit (all the gambling stuff) and maintain incredible good will. They’re a true “take the good with the bad” kind of company. I certainly don’t condone all the bad they’ve put out, and I also have to recognize all the good they’ve done at the same time.

Back to the root point. Small company focused on core business competencies, extremely effective at contracting non-core business functions. I wish more businesses functioned this way.

Valve is actually extremely small, I've heard estimates at around 350-400 people.

They're also a flat organization, with all the good and bad that brings, so scaling with contractors is easier than bringing on employees that might want to work on something else instead.

Proton is mainly a co-effort between in-house developers at Valve (with support on specific parts from contractors like Igalia), developers at CodeWeavers and the wider community.

For contextual, super specific, super specialized work (e.g. SCX-LAVD, the DirectX-to-Vulkan and OpenGL-to-Vulkan translation layers in Proton, and most of the graphics driver work required to make games run on the upcoming ARM based Steam Frame) they like to subcontract work to orgs like Igalia but that's about it.

Valve is known to keep their employee count as low as possible. I would guess anything that can reasonably be contracted out is.

That said, something like this which is a fixed project, highly technical and requires a lot of domain expertise would make sense for _anybody_ to contract out.

This is how "Company funding OSS" looks like in real life.

There have been demands to do that more on HN lately. This is how it looks like when it happens - a company paying for OSS development.

They seem to be doing it through Igalia, which is a company based on specialized consulting for the Linux ecosystem, as opposed to hiring individual contractors. Your point still stands, but from my perspective this arrangement makes a lot of sense while the Igalia employees have better job security than they would as individual contractors.

It would be a large effort to stand up a department that solely focuses on Linux development just like it would be to shift game developers to writing Linux code. Much easier to just pay a company to do the hard stuff for you. I'm sure the steam deck hardware was the same, Valve did the overall design and requirements but another company did the actual hardware development.

Speaking for myself, Valve has been great to work with - chill, and they bring real technical focus. It's still engineers running the show there, and they're good at what they do. A real breath of fresh air from much of the tech world.

They probably needed some point expertise on this one, as they build out their teams.

I don't know what you're trying to suggest or question. If there is a question here, what is it exactly, and why is that question interesting? Do they employ contractors? Yes. Why was that a question?

Valve has a weird obsession with maximizing their profit-per-employee ratio. There are stories from ex-employees out on the web about how this creates a hostile environment, and perverse incentives to sabotage those below you to protect your own job.

I don't remember all the details, but it doesn't seem like a great place to work, at least based on the horror stories I've read.

Valve does a lot of awesome things, but they also do a lot of shitty things, and I think their productivity is abysmal based on what you'd expect from a company with their market share. They have very successful products, but it's obvious that basically all of their income comes from rent-seeking from developers who want to (well, need to) publish on Steam.