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Comment by zxzax | Hacker News Reader

I've never liked that approach, it's leading with the stick and not the carrot and IMO it defeats the purpose of open source. It cuts away one of the main benefits of open source -- that companies can use it and start contributing back to it right away with no friction. AFAIK Microsoft, Amazon and Google actually DO hire a lot of open source maintainers at this time, for exactly this reason.

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Companies rarely contribute back except for very few projects like gcc and LLVM.

FAANG does hire OSS devs, but a lot of them don't really do that much apart from being excellent politicians. To be fair, they don't get any time for OSS development in the first place.

However, they do have time for politics and often ruin the projects. People play along because they want to get hired at GNAAF.

As a result, these projects combine the worst of corporate and OSS development (horrible atmosphere and yet no money for development).

A bit off topic, but instead of FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) I much more prefer the MAAAF or FAAAM acronym (Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft) because their monopolies basically make them a mafia family, and I don't really see Netflix belonging in the group.

That's a good point, also Netflix rarely has bad press as far as I know.

MAAAF for Mafia of MAGAF (Make Google Great Again, F...) are nicer.

If you want to make the allusion to the Mafia more obvious, then Apple could be abbreviated "i" (as in iOS, iPhone, iPad, etc.).

Not just politics, but often they'll couple OSS to their own build systems and stuff. Yeah, it might be 50ms faster on paper, but that whole project now depends on that company's OSS licensing allowing that dependency to exist publicly. That's some really scary power.

That seems to be a mostly orthogonal concern -- you're talking about a general issue of "doing business with big corporations" and not really something I would say is specific to any given project. One way to help improve the situation would be to help them win those battles so they can negotiate for more time to upstream useful things.

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