I think you can look at FAANG almost as the commercial arm of open source, it's not necessarily bad that they are the best at monetizing open source and increas

I think you can look at FAANG almost as the commercial arm of open source, it's not necessarily bad that they are the best at monetizing open source and increasingly specialized in doing so. It's only bad when they are greedy and keep all of that money, dodge taxes globally and strip benefits from all the employees they can. This is like the "billionaires can be philanthropists" problem... they overwhelmingly prefer not to so it is vastly less efficient to rely on their philanthropy individually vs a tax collected from all of them. FAANG have the funds and the expertise monetizing open source to carry the entire open source community many times over, but they will hit a combined trillion dollars in savings before that happens. They will dodge hundreds of billions more in taxes before fueling the open source fire that furthers technology and feeds them recruits, ideas and software. I've heard it argued that they do pay it forward through their own open source contributions. I think this is more accurately called paying it sideways if anything. They get legal tender fit for any purpose, and what proportionately little code they give back is not legal tender for any purpose.