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Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

Your 3 examples have a LOT of swes that work full time on open source/cncf projects not to mention they're platinum members of CNCF/Linux Foundation, etc. So I think that's a bit disingenuous. They're not funnelling billions into those tunnels but a huge majority of contributors are Redhat, Google, Coreos, Huawei, Alibaba, Intel and various other big names that definitely use open source tech and provide a huge benefit to us that are consuming it. K8s is moving so fast it's hard to even follow.

Kubernetes was donated to CNCF and there are a lot of Google SWEs working on "removing Google" from the actual project to make it more cloud native.

I really have a hard time picturing the success of CNCF/etc without the big names.

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From a global perspective it looks pretty fair that some company uses a lot of open source software and also contributes a lot. But it doesn't get anyone paid. If you're toiling away unpaid on Redis or MongoDB or whatever, the fact that Google gave the world k8s does not help you.

> the fact that Google gave the world k8s does not help you.

so google should give everything away AND also need to pay to every open source project, besides that smaller player don't?

sorry the world does not work like that. open source means giving and taking, not only taking. google might not be an angel, however restricting them to pay - OPEN SOURCE, non restrictive work - is just silly.

> Toiling away unpaid

I’d hazard a guess that even the most prolific open source individual contributors use more open source software written by others than they contribute to.

Nobody individually, could really ‘pull their weight’ with respect to contributing back to the community. I doubt most corporations could feasibly contribute back more software than they use, even if they tried.

How much of the money donated to organizations like CNCF or the Linux Foundation goes to the individual contributors who build these products?

They do help in some respects: I don't think Kubernetes would be as successful were it not for the big conferences put on by the CNCF. And, of course, lots of companies actually are contributing code back to Kubernetes particularly (and Linux, and some other projects). But there are also a lot of popular open source projects which are used by lots of big companies but don't get either code or money from them.

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