I don't think we need to bring morality to the discussion and complicate the issue.
Corporations are organized around profit, open-source is not. With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases.
To put Mozilla, a not-profit, in this context, in the same set that Google and Apple is not fair, by the way.
All three of these statements seem like nonsense.
First, "Corporations are organized around profit". No, they are legal entities, organized around articles of incorporation. These have a purpose statement. Often, those purpose statements are directed toward lawful business goals. But you do not have to be.
Non-profit vs profit corporations can, quite literally, have the same set of purposes. The only difference between the two is what you can do with profits.
"open-source is not".
I'm not even sure what you are trying to say here. Very large amounts of popular open source, is, in fact, produced by for-profit companies, and has been since the beginning of open-source. The term was even created by a group of people at a for-profit company. So ....
"With only that in mind you can predict what will happen in most of the cases."
No, you can let whatever biases you seem to have stoke your imagination and prognosticate. You can't actually predict what will happen. There are plenty of happy, well functioning for-profit companies in open source that have been helping open source for many many many years. There are also plenty of non-profits that have harmed open source greatly.
It takes a lot of blindness to see this stuff as simply black and white.
Red-Hat main worry is to be profitable. That's is above any other concern.
You can be sure that, if their bottom line was threatened, they will be pushed, in order to survive, to change their business model and they will not be beyond behaving in a "bad" (but legal) way if they don't see other way around the problem.
If fact, we can argue, that Red-Hat management, being it a public company, is forced by law to do that.
You're acting as though nobody who works at Red Hat cares about the community which they worked with before they had a job at Red Hat. I work at SUSE, and I work primarily as a member of a community. If SUSE started mistreating their customers or the wider community I would quit.
I hope that if you found that your company was mistreating the wider community you would also quit.
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My point is not that "all companies are good". I'm saying that making a judgement that "all companies will harm free software at the end of the day" ignores the fact that companies still need humans to work for them that do said contributions. Personally I find that many people who work in free software have quite strong ethics when it comes to things like this, but that's just my anecdote.
I have no idea how Red Hat or SUSE would act, maybe they would be an exception, and, maybe, very ethical workers could keep some companies in check.
In the other hand, I don't think that the idea of companies, in order to survive, will try anything (legal), should be so polemic.
I don't know where this view comes from, it was Stallman's goal from day one that it should be possible to have companies built around free software. The fact that my first job out of high school was working at a free software company should be celebrated as a huge accomplishment by the wider community. But it's not seen that way. I find it quite disheartening, because I've always been an advocate for free software and my job title doesn't suddenly change that.
I realise that you're not saying that (and so I'm sorry for the strong response), and of course we must question the motives of companies. But it's become a popular game these days to pretend as though everything that a free software developer does as part of a job must be part of a conspiracy to create a monopoly -- it's ludicrous and is quite grating.
I think people are interested in their basics, income, job, family before any other priorities.
Some people infact become so paranoid about this they may overlook even support unethical action as long as they are safe.
Surveillance, profiling and dark patterns by leading SV companies including Google, Facebook, Palantir etc composed of tens of thousands of engineers who may at one time have loudly proclaimed contrary values is just one example of this.
The comparison isn't as appropriate, as Oracle is a much bigger company, and is able to handle the loss of that many people in a better way. But the jist is similar.
That was the result, they tried to mistreat the OpenSolaris community and then Oracle no longer was competitive in the Solaris space.
If you want to learn more, check out bcantrill's talk. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
You could argue that, but you would almost certainly be wrong. It is a myth that management at a company is always required to seek profit above everything else. Indeed, many companies explicitly do not do this, for example by having policies about operating in an environmentally friendly way for ethical reasons.
I'm not saying that companies have to search profit above everything, I am saying that it's its main concern, otherwise they will not survive.
Indeed, management will have space to be nice when things go well, but they, automatically, will receive pressures from investors to change their nice ways when things go bad.
This is the way that it's intended to work and there is, I think, nothing surprising there.
There's a difference between short-term and long-term profitability. Being 'nice' might limit profits in the short term but might be crucial for long-term survival.
And, nobody knows for sure what the correct long-term strategy is. Not every step that yields an immediate profit is a step in the right direction.
For instance, you call Mozilla a non-profit. But it is a non-profit corporation, a legal entity that has organized itself in a certain way and applied for special tax treatment.
The goals and the incentives are very different.
The corporation is governed by the same rules as the foundation, compare https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/
> Our work is guided by the Mozilla Manifesto.
to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/
> The Mozilla Corporation is guided by the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto.
(I'm an employee of moco, I've always felt like I'm working at a values-based rather than a profit-based organization, personally.)
Just to clarify, since this sentence was ambiguous: not-for-profit companies do not have shareholders or owners. So the fact that there is no "pressure from shareholders" is vacuously true, because there are no shareholders.
Not-for-profits typically have donors and boards of directors, who both apply pressure to see the corporation's funds used to realize its mission.
I'm board member of smallish Czech non-profit and one of the things I've found out is that the legal requirements on the corporate governance structure are mostly equivalent to what is required for publicly tradeable corporation that is actually not publicly traded, thus for me it makes some sense to equate voting members to shareholders.
With just this information and no other, I think I'd predict corporations to make better software than open source. I take it that's not what you had in mind.
(This is for similar reasons that I expect for-profit companies to provide better service than government-run ones. I don't particularly want to get into a debate right now about whether that actually happens, just trying to explain my intuitions.)
What I mean is this: If you mix open-source with a for-profit entity, don't be surprise when that entity try to extract profits even in orthogonal ways to the original intention of the project.
Of course, in practice, and by the nature of open-source, this is a very difficult to do and, normally, can be prevented, but the trend is there and should be take into account.
Also Internet Explorer is infinitely better than Chrome and Firefox.
I blame the so-called "experts" and their propaganda about "complexity" and "human behaviour" for distorting the efficient market. In the cases of historical data it seems they have even retroactively distorted the markets.
I have opinions about to what extent my counterfactual prediction is correct; and to what extent it's not; and why it fails, in the cases that it fails. I left them out because they weren't relevant. If you wanted to talk about them, that's a thing I might be willing to do. But I'm not interested in being snarkily accused of mistakes I didn't make.
Heck in direct comparison Ubuntu 16.04 looks like a joke system compared to Windows 10, for example Ubuntu doesn't let me use my on board sound and only displays the dedicated sound card, but only half of the time. It has a horrible toy like ripped off user interface with ugly buttons, I can't think of a single application that is actually better than an equivalent application that is also available on Windows.The only reason I'm using Linux is because in a lot of areas including the field I work in it has achieved the same lock in that windows has for the general desktop market.
It is kind of sad that the only two alternatives are a clone of 70s technology or a clone of 80s technology. I feel like there should be a way to get things unstuck, but research into operating system design has all but ceased, with very few exceptions, many of them ironically coming from Microsoft.