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Comment by zdkl | Hacker News Reader

> there's enough return on investment for them

Honestly, this sort of thing is more effective marketing to me than any communication strategy. In brand awareness and "employer-ability".

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I can believe that, but it would still be hard to fathom that marketing to standards geeks like us brings in enough additional revenue to finance this, or that they'll be having access to talent that brings in so much more revenue than who they'd have been able to hire otherwise that it pays for this. But: that might very well be because I just don't understand the economics of this (which is why I'm hoping for someone to explain it with a back-of-the-napkin calculation :) ).

Having been involved in the discussions, maybe I can give a bit of an inside view here: When we got the suggestion to involve Igalia into building the TM6, it was on the one hand because of their proven expertise in webkit dev but on the otherhand also because they walk-the-talk on the OSS mindset - which is something our team values very much. We saw this as a chance a) to have a higher chance of including changes into the upstream that would benefit our products and b) to give back to opensource projects which our products benefit from for many years.

And yes of course we did consider that this might attract more like-minded fellows who are eager to build great products with great colleagues than our „corporate job advertisement“ ^^

Sounds great! So is it just that you're a relatively small company that can decide to give back just because the people it's made up of think it's the right thing to do?

With 12.000 employees worldwide I wouldn‘t say that Vorwerk is exactly small. ;) Yet, we are a family-owned company which takes pride in - as the marketing slogan said it - „putting a stubborn committment to the highest quality“. As we strive for long-term customer relationship by looking to build reliable, high-quality products, me and my colleagues value the work of the giants whose shoulders we‘re standing on - namely the open-source community. And we‘re lucky to have the backing and trust of our management team that giving back pays off for us and our customers in the long run.

I would certainly not call that small! I guess the fact that it's privately owned is then what made it possible. Good for you, sounds like a great place to work :)

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