FOSS software is written by people working at companies that likely owe their existence to VC.
FOSS software that many rely on that has been around for a while were non-VC: VCS, Linux / GNU / BSD, web browsers, various programming languages, various databases...
I think it’s easy to forget how long ago it was when FOSS truly was the outsider and wouldn’t be touched by most companies.
Mozilla/Firefox started in 1998 and then started taking ad revenue from Google in 2005, which pays for a large chunk of its development. It’s been part of the Silicon Valley money machine for 20 years, most of its existence.
Back then it was very normal to get VC funding and then hire the core committers of your most important open source software and pay them to keep working on it. I worked at Sendmail in the 90s and we had Sendmail committers (obviously) but also BSD core devs and linux core devs on staff. We also had IETF members on staff.
And we weren't unique, this happened a lot.
Was it in a different nature to current VC funded FOSS though? It sounds like their contributions to FOSS was tangential and not the sold product?
Maybe a bit more like Google and Chrome?
It's honestly hard to pick a pattern out for older open source project contributions. PostgreSQL started at UC Berkeley but people contributed to it from all over. Key engineers like Tom Lane worked a number of companies in the database field, some dependent on VC funding, some not. He's currently at Snowflake. [0] A lot of recent innovation around PostgreSQL today (Neon, Supabase, etc.) is VC funded.
That pattern changed with projects like Hadoop, which was about the time that VC funds recognized a standard playbook around monetizing open source. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_(computer_scientist)
I don't know why people are so upset here.
I don’t think everything VCs touch is gold, but it’s also not the case that they are pure evil either. It’s almost as if you can’t claim they are all good or all bad.