> This seems to be less and less the case. Because companies are more ruthlessly focused on the bottom line, and don't think they can afford to have anyone work

> This seems to be less and less the case. Because companies are more ruthlessly focused on the bottom line, and don't think they can afford to have anyone working on something they don't own or that might help a competitor? I dunno. For one, if one's open source product is so good that BigTech wraps its software around it, then that's a cause for validation and celebration. For example, it is pointless for the Rust community to bemoan Google's use of Rust to improve ChromeOS' security; or for Dr. D. Richard Hipp to bemoan pretty much every company for building money making software around SQLite. Besides, like Bryan Cantrill points out in the blog post I linked to from above, it is often trivial for BigTech to expend effort to re-implement the API surface (MongoDB -> DocumentDB) or even the rewrite whole software (MariaDB -> Aurora) if that's what they need to do to compete with anyone's FOSS / source-available offering. > There's possibly "companies with FOSS products" that arne't "FOSS companies". Of course, I am not saying FOSS is the one true way when just recently tech companies like Zoom and Snowflake have demonstrated the potential of proprietary tech; but just that FOSS will commodotize your core, may be half-heartedly, or even half as effectively, but it will happen and there are business opportunities to be built around it. In fact, FOSS is one of the last few avenues left to take on BigTech, as far as technology is concerned. When I say FOSS, I don't mean the kind of throw-all-commits-over-the-wall, superficial-community-engagement FOSS Google does with Android and Chrome. Google can do so because they have got the money to keep funding "an open source loss leader". For any other upstart it'd be suicidal to keep such an iron-grip on their FOSSd codebase (like Elastic will find out in the coming years). The right approach for such upstarts is to create a Foundation around the tech (k8s) or donate to one (Cloudera / Hortonworks), and generally try to really rake in the benefits that being open-source brings.