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There is a dead comment that not so nicely stated that large companies are the biggest funders to open source. This doesn't seem too far off... anyone have any

• Kovah 6y ago
  I think it's really hard to gather data for this, because aside from a few big projects, most sponsoring and stuff is happening outside of any traceable area, i.e. private people sponsoring other private people for some small software. I think the point is: the contributions of some companies to few, very large projects are about the same as the thousands of 1-dollar-contributions private people do to the remaining 99.9% of open source software.
• jcbrand 6y ago
  There are some relatively famous projects that are sponsored by large companies, but then an extremely long tail of lesser known projects that don't have a corporate benefactor and are developed collaboratively by small dev shops, freelancers and volunteers. I've been involved in the FOSS world for 15 years, and can't remember ever working with, or receiving patches from a large corporation. I think large corps generally think they can dominate the landscape, and are therefore less likely to adopt the more collaborative approach inherent to FOSS.