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Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

As yet, Valve is the only company I know of doing this, and it's paying off in dividends both for Linux and for Valve. In just 5ish years of Valve investing people and money into Linux- specifically mesa and WINE, Linux has gone from a product that is kind of shaky with Windows, to "I can throw a windows program or game at it and it usually works". Imagine how further the OSS ecosystem would be if Open Source hadn't existed, only FOSS; and companies were legally obligated to either publish source code or otherwise invest in the ecosystem.

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WINE, CodeWeavers, Mesa, Red Hat, and plenty of others have been pumping money into the Linux graphics subsystems for a very long time. It's cool that Valve was able to use its considerable wealth to build a business off of it. But they came in at a pretty opportune time.

Windows support had gotten a boost from .NET going open source as well as other stuff MS began to relax about. It also helped that OpenGL was put to rest and there was a new graphics API that could reasonably emulate DirectX. I don't know much about the backstory of Mesa, but it's pretty cool tech that has been developing for a long time.

Valve is so successful because it is a private company, and the CEO is the CTO and he is essentially the corporate equivalent of a religious monk. How else can you get 20+ years to slowly build a software business?

As a side note YC and tech startups themselves have become reality TV. Your goal should be Valve! You should be Gabe Newell! You don’t need to be famous! Just build something valuable and be patient

> How else can you get 20+ years to slowly build a software business?

It used to be normal to build a business slowly over 20 years. Now everyone grabs for the venture capital, grows so fast they almost burst, and the venture capital inevitably ends in enshittification as companies are forced by shareholders to go against their business model and shit over their customers in order to generate exponential profit margins.

Steam is the most dominant game tool on the planet and landed when there was not yet a market for it. Very few other projects will get to the level of success it has in any sector, anywhere.

GabeN was also a MS developer back in the day and likely would have been well off regardless, but he didn't need to play the YC A-B-let's-shoehorn-AI bullshit games that are 100% de rigeour for all startups in 2025.

From what I understand, Gabe/Valve almost went bust during Half Life's development. His gamble paid off when that turned into a runaway success, but he still could have lost it when he bet again on HL2 and Steam; at the time it was extremely controversial to make those a package deal. If Half Life 2 had been not quite as good as it turned out to be, it could have turned out to be a studio with a one hit wonder that burned their goodwill with some sketchy DRM sort of scheme on their second game.

Ironically, Gabe is more famous than the rest of whoever you're talking about, not because he seeks fame but just because he generally does right by his customers and makes himself accessible. Telling gamers to email him with questions, concerns, comments, anything, and then actually responding. Even though he's apparently spending most of his time hanging out on yachts, people love him because he makes an effort to be tuned in to what his customers want. If you do that, you'll be famous in a better way than what you can get from reality TV.

Credit to wine and cross over (?)for years and years of work as well

WINE was a thing for years and generally worked okay for a lot of things.

I was playing Fallout 3 on WINE well before Valve got involved with minimal tweaks or DIY effort.

Proton with Steam works flawlessly for most things including AAA games like RDR2 and it's great, but don't forget that WINE was out there making it work for a while

> WINE was a thing for years and generally worked okay for a lot of things.

Yes, but Valve's involvement handled "the last 10% takes the 90% of the time" part of WINE, and that's a great impact, IMHO.

Trivia: I remember WINE guys laughing at WMF cursor exploit, then finding the exploit works on WINE too and fix it in panic, and then bragging bug-for-bug compatibility with Windows. It was hilarious.

Also, WINE allowed Linux systems to be carrier for Windows USB flash drive virii without being affected by them for many years.

But this is a perfect example of one of those "90/10" esque ideas.

Even if Wine was 90% there technologically, the most important 90% is really that last 10.

I'm glad you threw in "I know of", because that part is true.

Feel free to read lore.kernel.org, and sort out where the people contributing many patches actually work.

Can't you just give the information you are hinting at? Other people than OP read this. You basically tell me to go read thousands of messages on a mailing list just solve your rhetorical question. (answer: Intel, Redhat, Meta, Google, Suse, Arm and Oracle. There are much more efficient ways to find this.) Yes, they are the main kernel contributors and have been for many years. I'm still not sure I understand the comment.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/

I think GP answered as they did because there are so many examples it's hard to know where to start.

It's not entirely unlike if someone said "the only person I know writing books successfully is Brandon Sanderson." I do think "you ought to go check out your local book store" would be a valid response.

No, "just" having to debunk BS from a BSer who lazily threw out misinformation is not the way to go. It's the BSer that needs to do more work.

I'd say as a counterpoint that just because someone works at, say, Meta or Oracle, and also contributes to OSS projects, that doesn't equate to the company they work at funding upstream projects (at least not by itself).

I don't even have to link the xkcd comic because everyone already knows which one goes here.

Well, if they use their work email, doesn't that mean their kernel work is endorsed by their employer?

People don't use their company email addresses for private work.

Linus does...

At GOOG you’re required to, by policy.

Everyone I know who contributes to Linux upstream is paid to do it. It's not really worth the hassle to bother trying if you weren't getting paid. It's also very easy to find companies that will pay you to work on Linux and upstream.

> Valve is the only company I know of [upstreaming fixes for open source software]

Sorry, that's ridiculous. Basically every major free software dependency of every major platform or application is maintained by people on the payroll of one or another tech giant (edit: or an entity like LF or Linaro funded by the giants, or in a smaller handful of cases a foundation like the FSF with reasonably deep industry funding). Some are better than others, sure. Most should probably be doing more. FFMpeg in particular is a project that hasn't had a lot of love from platform vendors (most of whom really don't care about software codecs or legacy formats anymore), and that's surely a sore point.

But to pretend that SteamOS is the only project working with upstreams is just laughable.

Sure, but the parent’s comment hits on something perhaps. All the tech giants contribute more haphazardly and for their own internal uses.

Valve does seem somewhat rare position of making a proper Linux distro work well with games. Google’s Chromebooks don’t contribute to the linux ecosystem in the same holistic fashion it seems.

From my time working at a Fortune 100 company, if I ever mentioned pushing even small patches to libraries we effing used, I'd just be met "try to focus on your tickets". Their OSS library and policies were also super byzantine, seemingly needing review of everything you'd release, but the few times I tried to do it the official way, I just never heard anything back from the black-hole mailing list you were supposed to contact.

Yes, I've also worked on OpenStack components at a university, and there I see Red Hat or IBM employees pushing up loads of changes. I don't know if I've ever seen a Walmart, UnitedHealth, Chase Bank, or Exxon Mobil (to pick some of the largest companies) email address push changes.

Those aren’t tech giants. They're just shit companies. I agree they greatly outnumber Big Tech, in employees if not talent.

Check again. The Optum unit of UnitedHealth Group has huge revenue from software and technical services. If just that part of the business was spun out it would be one of the top 20 US tech companies.

too bad UnitedHealthGroup is capital-E Evil and is literally running the "death panels" that insane right wing propaganda tried to scare us about

What a lot of people don't realize is that it's mostly employer HR departments running the "death panels". UHG and its competitors would be happy to sell insurance policies that cover absolutely everything with no questions asked: this would be easier for them to administer without the hassles of utilization management and claim edits. But customers — mainly large employers — demand that insurers (or third-party administrators) impose more restrictive coverage rules in order to hold down medical costs.

Ultimately there will always be some healthcare rationing. This happens in every country. For example, the UK NHS has death panels which decide that certain treatments won't be covered at all because they're not cost effective. Resources are limited and demand is effectively infinite. So the only real question is how we do the rationing.

> UHG and its competitors would be happy to sell insurance policies that cover absolutely everything with no questions asked...But customers — mainly large employers — demand that insurers (or third-party administrators) impose more restrictive coverage rules in order to hold down medical costs.

UHG has been caught denying claims for things that employers already paid them to cover for their employees. You can't blame HR departments for that. You also can't blame HR for UHG upcoding/overbilling which eats into the limited resources of hospitals and the limited resource of taxpayer money ultimately resulting in fewer people able to get the healthcare they need just so that UHG can line their own pockets.

While HR departments do have their own issues, they're nowhere near the level of pure evil that UHG is.

Walmart is a tech giant.

FWIW, when working at a major Silicon Valley tech company in the mid 2010s, my team made significant contributions to OSS projects including OpenStack and the Linux kernel as a core part of our work for Walmart.

The work to upstream our changes was included in the Statements of Work which Walmart signed off on, and our time spent on those efforts was billed to them.

The stats for those projects will have recorded my former employer as the direct source of those contributions - but they wouldn't have existed had it not been for Walmart.

I don't know about ExxonMobil but Walmart, UnitedHealth Group, and JPMorganChase employees do actively contribute to open source projects. Maybe just not the ones you used. They have also published some of their own.

https://github.com/walmartlabs

https://github.com/Optum

https://github.com/jpmorganchase

To steelman this: I've never worked at any of the companies you listed but most likely Red Hat and IBM employees (Is there still a difference?) are being paid specifically to work on Openstack, as they get money from support contracts. When Walmart of Chase use Openstack there is a rather small team who is implementing openstack to be used as a platform. They are then paying IBM/Redhat for that support. There probably isn't really the expertise in the Openstack team at Warlmart to be adding patches. Some companies spend a different amount of money on in house technology than others, and then open source it.

They totally broke CSGO Legacy's code to push its sequel CS2 and won't accept fixes for it because it's 'not being supported'.

To be clear, both of those are closed source, proprietary games owned by Valve. It makes sense for them to want to consolidate their player base in one game.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/4047

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