> why do so much for open source? For the low price of working under an open source[1] license, they bought over a decade of support from a large portion of te

> why do so much for open source? For the low price of working under an open source[1] license, they bought over a decade of support from a large portion of tech industry professionals. Google (along with the other FAANG businesses) was able to simply ask people to supporting their increasingly monopolistic position. When some of us attempted to warn about the long term consequences of giving Google/etc even more power, we were ignored or accused of being "crazy conspiracy theorists"; with a lot of open projects to use as counterexamples, and not many current, specific examples of Google actually abusing their power, a lot of people simply couldn't believe that Google might be doing anything bad. Open sourcing anything that overlapped with a competitor's proprietary software was a highly successful strategy to undermine the market and hurt their competitor's revenue. The minimax best move isn't always the move that maximizes your benefit; sometimes it's the move that minimizes your opponent.. [1] Note that while they use FSF/RMS-style free Software, Google generally doesn't license their open source software under the GPL. Their openness has a carefully considered limit.