logoalt Hacker News

pjmlp • yesterday at 9:45 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Name one big tech company in the same monetary level, that doesn't contribute to FOSS without second intentions.


Replies

wtetzner • yesterday at 10:22 PM

They definitely have other intentions, but it's often the same as people contributing in their free time: they use the software, want to make it better for their purposes, but don't want to be the ones to maintain it.

galaxyLogic • yesterday at 10:34 PM

Don't we all have "second intentions"?

Altruism happens usually among members of a tightly knit group, like family members or soldiers of a given unit. Teachers sacrificinng their life to save children. FOSS-developers, are they really producing software out of altruism? Maybe some of them are but it is hard for us to know whether that is so or not.

awesome_dude • today at 12:53 AM

If a FAANG releases Kafka, REACT, Kubernetes, or any number of projects that they found helpful, and released into open source - there will always be a claim that they do it with some second intention, such as "be seen to be a positive contributor to the community"

But the truth is - so do I - as a humble contributor to a document, test, bug fix, or feature add to a FOSS project - where's the beef?