Ask HN: The company where I work for doesn't care about giving back to FOSS | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The company where I work for doesn't care about giving back to FOSS

I was talking with a co-worker today and he said the company where we work for doesn't have any incentive to contribute back to FOSS yet the entire stack at this company is built on top of Linux and FOSS.

He mentioned he has tons of stuff he'd like to contribute but he is not allowed to by our employer.

This is sad and in my opinion companies like this are bad users of FOSS.

I asked my coworker why they don't feel like contributing and he said the company doesn't have any monetary gains if they contribute, even though they realize contributing to FOSS helps with reputation, provided the contributions are useful to the community.

Companies like this are really depressing to work for, they only take take take while giving nothing back, pay a shitty salary to people and get rich rich rich, sigh.

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So?

If you want to contribute, you can do it on your own time (review your contract first) and/or make the business case to your team and get signoff from the relevant people.

The business case normally isn't too hard: show how your team benefits from the contributions. "Reputation" is hard to manage but recruiting is easy. From a technical perspective, it just takes showing that some of the bugs/features you've handled in the system are easier maintained as part of the core system instead of an internal fork. I've done the same while working for software companies, non-tech companies that used software, and even the US federal government.

Finally, if you're working in software development and getting a "shitty salary" do something else. There are probably a dozen other companies hiring within a mile of where you work right now. Stop blaming others and go after what you want.

This is a personal issue. If it bothers you this much, change jobs. Or start your own company and have it comply with whatever ideals you ascribe to. Though, frankly, it sounds like your real beef is your shitty salary and this is just an excuse to tar them as evil in every way for not paying you enough. If the truth is you wouldn't actually care about this issue if they just paid you more, then you aren't the idealist you are trying to paint yourself as.

I've never seen any company where I worked caring about back contribution. At most, you could send an email to the lawyers and wait and wait and wait any answer.

That's why all my code is released only under the AGPL3, so that companies do not dare use my work without paying for it.

"This is sad and in my opinion companies like this are bad users of FOSS."

It might be 'sad' to you, but it's the only reason FOSS has gotten so popular in the last 10 years. When a company gets large enough and depends on it enough, they will hire developers to actually fix and contribute to FOSS. With almost all major projects, this is the case.

"It's really depressing to hear things like this and I feel I'm doing a disservice to the FOSS community for working at shitty companies like this even though I depend on the job to pay my bills."

How is it 'shitty'? FOSS is free. Which means the freedom to use it and not contribute back. It's pretty shitty to put the blame on them for not giving back to the community.

Also, they are paying you to work there.

You should read the licenses again. It's not $free, and if a corporation distributes a derived work (in any form, source, binary, firmware), then it has to provide the sources and their modifications, and their derived works along, depending on the license, and some other requirements (such as mention of copyright, etc). When you buy a hardware box, often you don't get the sources of the firmware containing the GPL linux kernel in it! That's clear violation of the license terms.

Your point is valid but you are perhaps overgeneralising: there are more FOSS licenses than the GPL, and there are many examples where it is perfectly legal to use FOSS software commercially without contributing anything back or providing source.

FOSS != GPL.

I've written plenty of stuff under the BSD license which has been distributed with and without modifications in tons of commercial products, rarely with source. Totally fine, and exactly as I intended.

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