9 ms·

It's a bit different when a corporation open sources their product because it brings them more business value than a corporation actually contributes to not the

by akerro 10y ago

It's a bit different when a corporation open sources their product because it brings them more business value than a corporation actually contributes to not their open source projects. Does MS do that?

Retr0spectrum 10y ago
Are there any examples where a company contributes to Open Source software, without any (direct or indirect) benefit to themselves? What difference does it make anyway?
- akerro 10y ago
  Yes it does make a difference. There is always some direct or indirect benefit, but it conts more when community is involved in development of OSS supported by corporation, like GSoC, where actual community is paid to work on selected projects, Clang, where Apple tried to reach consensus with GNU, BSD, Mozilla which creates a lot of fun stuff like Rust and Servo, their full MozLabs and WebOfThings, DuckDuckGo.
- ldjb 10y ago
  I think akerro is asking about the motivation for Microsoft's contributions to OSS, rather than whether they benefit from it (clearly they do). My impression, having spoken to people from Microsoft involved in OSS, is that they are pretty much entirely driven by what will make them the most profit. Sometimes that means making software "open source" and accepting contributions from the public (free labour!), other times that means keeping their software proprietary. They don't seem to care about ethics, or software freedom. It's a shame, but Microsoft aren't the only ones with that mentality. Big businesses are, more often than not, primarily motivated by profit.
  - UK-AL 10y ago
    So are most for profit open source based companies. Redhat development is probably solely based on profit to.
raesene6 10y ago
Yeah Microsoft contributes to a bunch of projects. I'm sure at least in part that's to help compatibility with their systems, but it still helps those projects that are not theirs. A good example is Docker where, IIRC, Microsoft people were the top non-docker contributor for a while.

by akerro 10y ago

Retr0spectrum 10y ago

Are there any examples where a company contributes to Open Source software, without any (direct or indirect) benefit to themselves? What difference does it make anyway?

akerro 10y ago
Yes it does make a difference. There is always some direct or indirect benefit, but it conts more when community is involved in development of OSS supported by corporation, like GSoC, where actual community is paid to work on selected projects, Clang, where Apple tried to reach consensus with GNU, BSD, Mozilla which creates a lot of fun stuff like Rust and Servo, their full MozLabs and WebOfThings, DuckDuckGo.
ldjb 10y ago
I think akerro is asking about the motivation for Microsoft's contributions to OSS, rather than whether they benefit from it (clearly they do). My impression, having spoken to people from Microsoft involved in OSS, is that they are pretty much entirely driven by what will make them the most profit. Sometimes that means making software "open source" and accepting contributions from the public (free labour!), other times that means keeping their software proprietary. They don't seem to care about ethics, or software freedom. It's a shame, but Microsoft aren't the only ones with that mentality. Big businesses are, more often than not, primarily motivated by profit.
- UK-AL 10y ago
  So are most for profit open source based companies. Redhat development is probably solely based on profit to.

raesene6 10y ago

Yeah Microsoft contributes to a bunch of projects. I'm sure at least in part that's to help compatibility with their systems, but it still helps those projects that are not theirs. A good example is Docker where, IIRC, Microsoft people were the top non-docker contributor for a while.