Does anyone actually believe that?
Why does Google sponsor Gnome, KDE, GIMP, LibreOffice, Open Street Maps?
This is very suspicious
It allows them to tell the antitrust regulators they are not a monopoly. “See? We’re fostering competition!”
That is not new. They’ve been doing that since the 2000s.
The way I understand it is that there are at least two reasons, maybe more:
- Google (like all tech companies) uses a lot of open source software internally, so benefits from it being improved
- Google wants to train possible future employees
Not everything Google or other big tech companies do is necessarily bad; we should be taking advantage of the good parts of what they do.
Yeah it’s definitely targeted at graduates making their first contributions / building a portfolio, but not for anything sustained.
Encroachment and control… These Corps does nothing without a purpose…
There are many, varied motivations for contributing to open source projects, and most of them aren’t a sense of altruism.
It’s great PR to market open source in utopian terms, but the reality is far more complicated.
The Apache web server wasn’t created out of the goodness of people’s hearts but out of mid-90s internet startups’ need for a reliable, scalable platform on which to profitably run services.
Unfortunately the ruling that corporations are people (and thus have the right to free speech via giving donating to political campaigns), was a real downgrade for people.
Maybe its a nti-competitive business strategy Check this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
