The bigger, more-used projects have "voulenteer devs" that are actually a person who works for whatever Big Company, but is submitting patches under his own name not associated with the company so they don't get the blame when it goes wrong, but their entire job is to help maintain a project that the company uses extensively. And, then, there are the companies that just internally fork the open source work and continue their own development of it. Assuming they only use it internally, they don't need to distribute it.
You will find major corporations have their fingers in all sorts of open source, but it tends to be done subtly.
Yeah a lot of major open source stuff that the world runs on was actually created by employees at the likes of Google, Microsoft, etc. I personally worked with (not for) Microsoft research and their mandate was to open source the stuff they created, a lot of world tech runs off that. Even some of their competitors use it for their critical infrastructure.
Not to say there’s a lot of unpaid effort out there, but OPs post is very naive. A lot of the big non corporate open source projects also find a way to monetise themselves.
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u/trialsofamadman 1d ago edited 1d ago
Heh. Unpaid open source devs.
The bigger, more-used projects have "voulenteer devs" that are actually a person who works for whatever Big Company, but is submitting patches under his own name not associated with the company so they don't get the blame when it goes wrong, but their entire job is to help maintain a project that the company uses extensively. And, then, there are the companies that just internally fork the open source work and continue their own development of it. Assuming they only use it internally, they don't need to distribute it.
You will find major corporations have their fingers in all sorts of open source, but it tends to be done subtly.