Big Tech Controls Many Major Open-Source Projects. Is That a Problem? | Hacker News Reader

Big Tech Controls Many Major Open-Source Projects. Is That a Problem?

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16 pointsSunTzu908712 comments

It wasn't that long ago that big tech controlled most software....as entirely closed-source. And that's still largely the case: the source for Google's search algorithms, Facebook's core platform, etc.

While it's good to be mindful that some projects are "controlled" by large tech companies, it's a huge improvement over the way it used to be. I'd rather see FB open-source React, Google open-source TensorFlow, etc. than keep it all proprietary.

Indeed, and the benefit of Open Source is that if the company takes a project in a direction that people aren't happy with (or abandons it) it can be forked.

In fact it could be argued that these companies only control these projects because the community allows them to.

Is it a problem? I remember when major tech companies were criticised for not embracing Open Source. People tried to convert Big Tech to embrace Open Source. Now they've clearly done so. Is this not what we wanted?

The grass is always greener on the other side, I guess?

Embracing open source != buying major open source or making open source an advertising platform for your for-profit endeavors.

That's true, but not exactly what's going on here. They have made many of their own stuff open source. Giving away for free things that used to be sold for money.

> making open source an advertising platform for your for-profit endeavors

Can you name an example? I don't see any adverts for RHEL in Fedora or Visual Studio / Azure in VS Code, so I'm struggling to come up with something.

Steve Klabnik writes about this prolifically:

The culture war at the heart of open source: https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-...

What comes after “open source”: https://words.steveklabnik.com/what-comes-after-open-source

Considering the resources that it takes to maintain these projects it’s best they have some serious backing and not just a few volunteers.

Lets have the interests of giant for-profit corporations backing our open source projects, that will surely end up in the best interests for free and open software!

I was the creator of a reasonably popular framework. I was only able to build it because the company I worked for had interest in me working on it nearly full time. Now that I’m not there anymore, I can no longer devote the time to continue maintaining it.

Luckily people have taken my place, but if that company didn’t devote resources it wouldn’t exist and/or be unmaintained. There is no way you could expect unpaid volunteers to take on that amount of work.

It's hard to argue that a project having clear leadership and being well funded would be against its best interests.

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