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I don't see why big companies like Google, AWS and the like wouldn't fund open source development, precisely because they have realized great returns using thos

I don't see why big companies like Google, AWS and the like wouldn't fund open source development, precisely because they have realized great returns using those softwares to reap monetary benefit. If I were a CEO and my core business was built on OSS, I would allocate budget to help the projects used within my organization. It's just common sense to do so. Reality might be different but then that makes for some really short sighted decision making on behalf of those companies.

boulos 8y ago
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Actually, we do precisely this. Google contributes heavily to Linux, KVM, LLVM, and so on in addition to the open source projects we launched (Android, Chromium, Kubernetes to name some popular ones). Our marketing team decided to highlight this on https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud/ https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud/ which does an okay job. Feedback welcome, and I’ll pass it along to them.
- Beltiras 8y ago
  That's very good. Does Google also donate money to OSS projects they use? Postgres? Redis? uWSGI? Gunicorn? MySQL? I'd imagine they are heavily used in many projects within Google.
  - infinite8s 8y ago
    They aren't used.
    - cmsj 8y ago
      Google definitely uses MySQL (e.g. https://www.mysql.com/customers/view/?id=555 https://www.mysql.com/customers/view/?id=555) and offers a MySQL deployment/management as a Service in GCloud. No idea what, if any, their contributions back to upstream have been, but I know they've been using it for important internal stuff for years, so I would be very surprised if, at the very least, no patches have come from out from the chocolate factory doors.
      - mrep 8y ago
        Google built and open sourced an entire horizontal scaling cluster management system for MySQL: https://vitess.io/ https://vitess.io/
pwaivers 8y ago
I think the argument from this article is that the core business for AWS is not the OSS. Their core business is to provide "performance, scalability, and availability". So it is a financial reality that they can (and should) replace the software if they want to.
- Beltiras 8y ago
  I read the final point as saying that therefore they won't support OSS. I think that would be misguided.

boulos 8y ago

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud. Actually, we do precisely this. Google contributes heavily to Linux, KVM, LLVM, and so on in addition to the open source projects we launched (Android, Chromium, Kubernetes to name some popular ones). Our marketing team decided to highlight this on https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud/ https://cloud.google.com/open-cloud/ which does an okay job. Feedback welcome, and I’ll pass it along to them.

Beltiras 8y ago
That's very good. Does Google also donate money to OSS projects they use? Postgres? Redis? uWSGI? Gunicorn? MySQL? I'd imagine they are heavily used in many projects within Google.
- infinite8s 8y ago
  They aren't used.
  - cmsj 8y ago
    Google definitely uses MySQL (e.g. https://www.mysql.com/customers/view/?id=555 https://www.mysql.com/customers/view/?id=555) and offers a MySQL deployment/management as a Service in GCloud. No idea what, if any, their contributions back to upstream have been, but I know they've been using it for important internal stuff for years, so I would be very surprised if, at the very least, no patches have come from out from the chocolate factory doors.
    - mrep 8y ago
      Google built and open sourced an entire horizontal scaling cluster management system for MySQL: https://vitess.io/ https://vitess.io/

pwaivers 8y ago

I think the argument from this article is that the core business for AWS is not the OSS. Their core business is to provide "performance, scalability, and availability". So it is a financial reality that they can (and should) replace the software if they want to.

Beltiras 8y ago
I read the final point as saying that therefore they won't support OSS. I think that would be misguided.