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I'm really not splitting hairs. "Contributing back to the community" sorta implies you're opening a PR, following coding guidelines, writing tests even perhaps

I'm really not splitting hairs. "Contributing back to the community" sorta implies you're opening a PR, following coding guidelines, writing tests even perhaps. What happens in practice is corps just hack everything together and rush stuff out the door -- no communities want those contributions. It's rare that these sort of releases contain anything novel or useful. Take a look at the OSS releases for Amazon's products (Echo, FireTV) and be prepared to be underwhelmed.

mimixco 6y ago
Exactly this. Most of the software others will build with GPL'd stuff isn't interesting to the owner of the original code. They're not doing it to fix bugs. They're doing it to add stuff for their own products. No community of the original software's devs is going to want the output of everyone else's surrounding code or customizations.