The FAANG etc failed me for anything open source sponsorship related.
Their business depends on it, they made a fortune out of it, yet they donate little or nothing to it, or worse, they forked it and was reluctant to upstream anything.
pick Amazon randomly, it went from exploiting to rip-off in my opinion, thanks to its boss , who sails on a luxury yacht and asks all his employees to be frugal. they all look similar to me as far as supporting OSS goes.
Chromium underpins nearly every major browser that isn't Safari or Firefox. And even more narrowly, V8 powers Node (and Deno).
More Google contributions: Angular, Kubernetes, gRPC, Golang.
Microsoft: C#, TypeScript, Language Server Protocol, VSCode.
Meta: React, zstd, Apache Cassandra, LLAMA.
This isn't even getting into open source patches (Google has consistently been one of the top 10 Linux kernel contributors for the last decade), systems papers that have inspired research and other systems (BigTable, Dynamo, MapReduce, Colossus, Spanner), standards work (HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 were both adapted from Google technology), security vulnerability work (Project Zero).
(The above list is definitely Google-skewed because that's what I know.)
Chrome, though, is a kind of mixed bag. It already has too many features, most likely the reason it underpins so many other browsers is that nobody can keep up with the rate at which Google shovels shit into there.
They should slow down. It would be nice if they could just spend a couple years working purely on stability/performance/security, but alternatively they could just stop, it would be better for the ecosystem.
What FAANG does not do is support critical yet underappreciated Unix infrastructure. By this I mean directly donating to developers without trying to take over the projects.
The quality of FAANG code, especially in the fault-tolerant machine learning space, is questionable as well. I'm not sure why so many commenters (in other comments!) attribute near magical qualities to any output of FAANG.
FAANG are not charities. If they are sold a license for the software for $0, then they don't have much of reason to pay for it.
People apparently forget the amount of money that was and is injected into them.
Someone has to put the money on the table to attend ISO meetings, buy the standards, implement the features into existing C and C++ compilers, for example.
Many of Google's OSS projects are there to help its profits, if not, Google could stop or kill it at will which is fine and is 1 millions times better than closed code, still not the same as projects like python etc.
Do you think they are irrational?
there is graphql, rocksdb and folly. they also open sourced their js engine for react native too.
maybe a good criticism is we depend to much on these companies free stuff lol
It was their authors choice first and foremost to publish them as OSS
There is no legal obligation per-se. Open Source is a charity, but you can understand a lot about a company's motives if you compare their FOSS usage to their FOSS contributions.
Goodwill might work for individual contributors, but it’s not enough of an incentive for organizations.
It _should_ be. There's nothing stopping organizations from doing good things except expectation.
There are real costs and that has real consequences. Expectation is way down on the list.
It’s clearly not perfect calculus since so many defect from OSS, but there’s also clearly some business sense there.
Then it just transitions to a charity that everyone relies on. It's been embarrassingly difficult for people to admit this vis-a-vis Linux and the like, but it's obvious in a situation like programming languages. We rely on the enduring charity of it's authors, license-holders and distributors to write and distribute software.
"Giving back" is not an inherently cynical process. Meta has no obligation to publish these patches in the first place, much less work as a part of the community to solve a common issue. But they do, and it's just kinda part of their culture at this point. Yes, they do still gain from it; but so do their direct competitors. It's difficult to characterize as a purely business-motivated decision, because there are much greedier avenues to pursue if that's their MO.
It is all about knowing individual engineers inside these companies. Nearly any engineer in FAANG can, with a little effort, donate their own work time to an opensource project in the form of submitting patches.
The project can help in various ways. Make sure licensing stuff is in place so that whatever IP review process the company has goes smoothly. Make sure PR's are reviewed fast. Delegate responsibility ('hi, would you like to be maintainer of this feature?'). Make sure contributions are publicly recognised (ie. Public page of maintainers/biggest contributors).
Remember that most engineers inside big companies are trying to generate good content for their performance review. "Wrote and open source some code" is usually one of the checkboxes.
I know at least one of those letters that does not want you doing that without jumping through hoops and getting prior approvals. I will let you guess which one that is.
Meta has its own production fork of CPython, Cinder:
There's a whole Silicon Valley episode on this.
Next.js exists too which mashed up PHP/Ruby style with React.
I know it is not a popular opinion but the AGPL is there for a reason. If you release your code under a permissive license you should not be surprised that others benefit from it - sometimes massively. That is how it is supposed to be. You can still lament that it is unjust and I feel you, because in a sense it is. If it really bothers you, the solution is easy. Next time choose the AGPL.
Meta and Google have both contributed an enormous amount to open source (creating PyTorch, TensorFlow, Chromium, contributing to clang/LLVM, Linux kernel, HTTP standards), but you're mad because they didn't sponsor your work and a bunch of people mindlessly upvoted it.
Assuming the company doesn't have clause to not allow contributing to open source. These companies should be publicly shamed if they use any open source code.
Or do license terms apply differently if you’re Meta?
I had no problems with this by the way, just saying maybe he can contribute 0.001% of his profit to those OSS projects that he depends on, it will help him to build more yachts too.
One can argue to what extent Bezos is still ultimately "the boss" at Amazon given that he's not the CEO any more, but...