Massive companies everywhere have thousands and thousands of people collectively working all day on free software as their main job.
You’re probably using a free software browser from a corporation right now?
Free (as in 'free beer') is not the same as FOSS.
Who said it was?
Chrome, Safari, Firefox are all primarily FOSS - they have some proprietary trademark and minor components, but the actual browser core in each is FOSS.
https://policies.google.com/terms
https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.htm...
Maybe there's some code that at one point was FOSS in those products, but the products themselves are nor Free.
IMHO a code base that has been forked from a FOSS project cannot be considered FOSS itself even if they keep retrofitting changes back to the original, because you cannot know what is there in the proprietary part. This is specially true if you distribute the derivative product only in binary form.
But you're also wrong.
The trademarked Chrome distribution is built from the free Chromium, where main-line development is done. They don't dump changes over the wall like you're suggesting. That's the same for WebKit and Firefox.
BSD and MIT licenses are Open Source but not Free, they are more concerned with providing a claim of ownership to the author than with the freedom of the user.
LGPL is a backdoor to let Free Software interact with non Free Software, which is a good thing too. If your product uses Free Libraries, no big deal, the more the merrier. But you cannot claim it is also Free y proxy.
Look at threads you've commented in in your browser's incognito mode to see how your comments are invisible (Not this one, I've vouched for you which makes them visible, and some others have been vouched for.)
Your comments have been hidden by default to all users except those that chose to view them like me since September 2017. That's why so few people reply to you. You've been talking into a void. Don't know what you did back then to piss someone off!
Crazy isn't it?
We also have to be careful about what we define as a 'corporation'. You're clearly putting non-profits under that category and that may be fair, I don't know, but for non-profit corporations that have a large portion of their income in the form of donations or have been created with the specific charter of promoting, developing or maintaining FOSS, it seems pretty disingenuous to lump them into the same 'corporate' category. It gets further complicated if you consider colleges and universities as corporations.
Here are some links that may help move the discussion, though they don't answer the question head on (as far as I can tell):
* https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-ever-tried-to-estimate-the-...
* https://www.linux.com/news/study-open-source-worth-387-billi...
* https://octoverse.github.com/2016/
* https://thenewstack.io/week-numbers-data-lots
* https://www.techrepublic.com/article/who-contributes-most-to...
* https://redmonk.com/dberkholz/2013/04/22/the-size-of-open-so...
* https://www.techrepublic.com/article/for-50-percent-of-devel...
Some estimates put the Linux kernel at around $300B+. The above links measure contributions from various companies, of which Microsoft (who now owns GitHub) and Mozilla make the top 10. There needs to be some work done to figure out the actual answer the question ("do corporations fund/create the majority of FOSS?"), including figuring out what aspects of the question are actually valid, like whether it's code used or code created, what counts as a 'corporation' etc.
Like I said, I don't actually know but this is something that I had a bias towards believing that FOSS excelled in spite of corporate backing instead of because of it.
I'll say it again: citation needed.
A rather better term would be FLOSS [1]