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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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