> For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain.

This is provably false and wish that sentiment would die

Microsoft spends at least $600-$800 million on open source The make VS Code, .NET/C#, Edge, TypeScript. They provide free hosting, free CIs, free issues, discussions, free webpages (github). Google spends similar amounts on Chromium, Angular, Go, Flutter, Gemma, etc...

Meta spends similar amounts on React, PyTorch, Presto, Llama

Amazon sends 200-300 million on valkey, OpenSearch, FireCracker, and has dedicated engineers for Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Rust

Apple provide swift, WebKit, Clang/LLVM - there spending is also in the 100-200 million range.

That's on top of employees at almost all of those companies fixing bugs and providing patches for everything they use.

People make up the claims like the OP with zero actual evidence.