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So generous! The FAANG etc failed me for anything open source sponsorship related. Their business depends on it, they made a fortune out of it, yet they donat

So generous! The FAANG etc failed me for anything open source sponsorship related. Their business depends on it, they made a fortune out of it, yet they donate little or nothing to it, or worse, they forked it and was reluctant to upstream anything. pick Amazon randomly, it went from exploiting to rip-off in my opinion, thanks to its boss , who sails on a luxury yacht and asks all his employees to be frugal. they all look similar to me as far as supporting OSS goes.

nradov 3y ago
Meta contributes a huge amount to the open source community. https://opensource.fb.com/ https://opensource.fb.com/
- stevefan1999 3y ago
  React alone is one of the biggest feast Meta brought to open source community, and shaped the web from monolithic pages (back then PHP and jQuery is the majority) towards modular components design. Later they even introduced functional programming paradigm in the mix. Next.js exists too which mashed up PHP/Ruby style with React.
acedTrex 3y ago
In terms of companies that rip off open source and do not give back meta is certainly one of the more active "give back" companies. React/Native, docusaurus, buck, pytorch, rocksdb...
- synergy20 3y ago
  yes some big companies did open source projects and Meta is a good role model, for many those OSS projects, they work for the companies themselves first then the community, though they are indeed still 1 million times better than closed and proprietary code. I'm mainly referring to long standing fundamental projects that made the rest projects possible, not those projects that are created and managed by the big companies themselves.
  - ushakov 3y ago
    Why is Meta obligated to give anything back to these projects? It was their authors choice first and foremost to publish them as OSS
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      Traditionally speaking, it's because they're the most qualified to do it. Every FAANG company takes from Open Source in order to succeed, so contributing back to a FOSS codebase is the ultimate act of corporate goodwill. You are burning real-life money and engineering hours to fix a problem for everyone and ensure that it stays protected under the same Open license that let your company succeed. There is no legal obligation per-se. Open Source is a charity, but you can understand a lot about a company's motives if you compare their FOSS usage to their FOSS contributions.
      - jorvi 3y ago
        I think this misses the point. FAANGs don’t improve OSS code out of goodwill, they do it because it benefits them. Upstreaming those improvements has very little marginal cost, and it bolsters an environment where other companies do the same. Rising tide and all that.
        sroussey 3y ago
        That is the whole point of GPL — to incentivize contributors for the common good. Goodwill might work for individual contributors, but it’s not enough of an incentive for organizations.
        NegativeK 3y ago
        > it’s not enough of an incentive for organizations. It _should_ be. There's nothing stopping organizations from doing good things except expectation.
        3y ago
- curt15 3y ago
  btrfs
  - Geezus_42 3y ago
    How long have they been working on a stable RAID 5/6 implementation?
    - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
      Why would they? Nobody except a few home users needs RAID 5/6. There's only a small handful of talented filesystem developers (never mind the filesystem, it's equally applicable to all of them), and there's always something to do which will benefit all of us. Especially for something so feature-packed and complicated.
- pgwhalen 3y ago
  "Giving back" might be an understatement for Meta's open source contributions. They are the bedrock of so much OSS in the last decade, it's everyone _else_ that is "giving back."
londons_explore 3y ago
> yet they donate little or nothing to it, It is all about knowing individual engineers inside these companies. Nearly any engineer in FAANG can, with a little effort, donate their own work time to an opensource project in the form of submitting patches. The project can help in various ways. Make sure licensing stuff is in place so that whatever IP review process the company has goes smoothly. Make sure PR's are reviewed fast. Delegate responsibility ('hi, would you like to be maintainer of this feature?'). Make sure contributions are publicly recognised (ie. Public page of maintainers/biggest contributors). Remember that most engineers inside big companies are trying to generate good content for their performance review. "Wrote and open source some code" is usually one of the checkboxes.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  > Nearly any engineer in FAANG can, with a little effort, donate their own work time to an opensource project in the form of submitting patches. I know at least one of those letters that does not want you doing that without jumping through hoops and getting prior approvals. I will let you guess which one that is.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Thats the "with a little effort" bit. But as long as you have a business case (eg. "we are adding this feature for our use, but it will lower our costs if it is upstreamed rather than maintained as a private patch"), it will usually be greenlighted.
- atomlib 3y ago
  Typically FAANGs have a clause that they own everything that you code even outside of working hours.
  - fmajid 3y ago
    No, Meta’s contract has explicit carve-outs for Open-Source work done on personal time that are more generous than Canonical’s (I had to choose between the two 3 months ago). Meta has its own production fork of CPython, Cinder: https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder
ushakov 3y ago
Are the companies at fault for not paying for something that is sold for free? Or do license terms apply differently if you’re Meta?
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
It's easy to blame the boss, but I don't think its the companies responsibility to give back to open source just because they use it. If you think open source is helping you, you could contribute it in your time without expectation to get paid for it. Most open source projects work like this. And if some company needs some extra feature, they should pay market rate for it. Assuming the company doesn't have clause to not allow contributing to open source. These companies should be publicly shamed if they use any open source code.
- mickael-kerjean 3y ago
  From the many people who asks for things, only a tinny percentage are actually willing to pay for it. Take Microsoft, I had one of their employee asking me to support their azure stuff: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/180 https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/180. When I found out the dude was actually employed by Microsoft, I somehow though he could give a hand, but no he was just there to make some feature request ...
ActorNightly 3y ago
If you are going to attempt to make bombastic criticisms, at least get your facts right. Amazons boss certainly does not sail on a yacht.
- synergy20 3y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/style/bezos-yacht-koru.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/style/bezos-yacht-koru.ht..., this is indeed delayed thanks to COVID, it is his own yacht and I am pretty sure he sailed on yachts before building himself one. I had no problems with this by the way, just saying maybe he can contribute 0.001% of his profit to those OSS projects that he depends on, it will help him to build more yachts too.
  - ActorNightly 3y ago
    Yeah that fine and all, but the person in the article is not the CEO of Amazon.
- kemayo 3y ago
  They're referring to Bezos' yacht: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/style/bezos-yacht-koru.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/style/bezos-yacht-koru.ht... One can argue to what extent Bezos is still ultimately "the boss" at Amazon given that he's not the CEO any more, but...
vitus 3y ago
Between pytorch (Meta) and TensorFlow (Alphabet), I'd be surprised if there's much if any ML work today that doesn't rely on OSS projects from FAANG companies. Chromium underpins nearly every major browser that isn't Safari or Firefox. And even more narrowly, V8 powers Node (and Deno). More Google contributions: Angular, Kubernetes, gRPC, Golang. Microsoft: C#, TypeScript, Language Server Protocol, VSCode. Meta: React, zstd, Apache Cassandra, LLAMA. This isn't even getting into open source patches (Google has consistently been one of the top 10 Linux kernel contributors for the last decade), systems papers that have inspired research and other systems (BigTable, Dynamo, MapReduce, Colossus, Spanner), standards work (HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 were both adapted from Google technology), security vulnerability work (Project Zero). (The above list is definitely Google-skewed because that's what I know.)
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Some of these are great examples. Chrome, though, is a kind of mixed bag. It already has too many features, most likely the reason it underpins so many other browsers is that nobody can keep up with the rate at which Google shovels shit into there. They should slow down. It would be nice if they could just spend a couple years working purely on stability/performance/security, but alternatively they could just stop, it would be better for the ecosystem.
- krlacn 3y ago
  A lot of these (but not all) strike me a flashy things for which you get promoted. Many people don't need any of these. What FAANG does not do is support critical yet underappreciated Unix infrastructure. By this I mean directly donating to developers without trying to take over the projects. The quality of FAANG code, especially in the fault-tolerant machine learning space, is questionable as well. I'm not sure why so many commenters (in other comments!) attribute near magical qualities to any output of FAANG.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    >By this I mean directly donating to developers without trying to take over the projects. FAANG are not charities. If they are sold a license for the software for $0, then they don't have much of reason to pay for it.
weinzierl 3y ago
This is disappointing but certainly not surprising and to some part we as an open source community have to blame our selves. I know it is not a popular opinion but the AGPL is there for a reason. If you release your code under a permissive license you should not be surprised that others benefit from it - sometimes massively. That is how it is supposed to be. You can still lament that it is unjust and I feel you, because in a sense it is. If it really bothers you, the solution is easy. Next time choose the AGPL.
- catlifeonmars 3y ago
  AGPL is kind of a sledgehammer.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  I've released open-source projects under an Apache license because I want others to benefit from my work. I knowingly didn't choose GPL-flavored licenses because they limit people's ability to do this.
mliker 3y ago
React, PyTorch, Tensorflow, and many others, all from FAANG. Benefits the ecosystem and their businesses. Not a bad trade.
patrec 3y ago
What did Amazon rip off from you?
kasitmp 3y ago
An interesting example of a big company profiting from open source: Microsoft, going from fighting open source to copilot.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kylevedder 3y ago
It's stupid sour grapes comments like this that make me hate HN commenters. Meta and Google have both contributed an enormous amount to open source (creating PyTorch, TensorFlow, Chromium, contributing to clang/LLVM, Linux kernel, HTTP standards), but you're mad because they didn't sponsor your work and a bunch of people mindlessly upvoted it.

nradov 3y ago

Meta contributes a huge amount to the open source community. https://opensource.fb.com/ https://opensource.fb.com/

stevefan1999 3y ago
React alone is one of the biggest feast Meta brought to open source community, and shaped the web from monolithic pages (back then PHP and jQuery is the majority) towards modular components design. Later they even introduced functional programming paradigm in the mix. Next.js exists too which mashed up PHP/Ruby style with React.

acedTrex 3y ago

In terms of companies that rip off open source and do not give back meta is certainly one of the more active "give back" companies. React/Native, docusaurus, buck, pytorch, rocksdb...

synergy20 3y ago
yes some big companies did open source projects and Meta is a good role model, for many those OSS projects, they work for the companies themselves first then the community, though they are indeed still 1 million times better than closed and proprietary code. I'm mainly referring to long standing fundamental projects that made the rest projects possible, not those projects that are created and managed by the big companies themselves.
- ushakov 3y ago
  Why is Meta obligated to give anything back to these projects? It was their authors choice first and foremost to publish them as OSS
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Traditionally speaking, it's because they're the most qualified to do it. Every FAANG company takes from Open Source in order to succeed, so contributing back to a FOSS codebase is the ultimate act of corporate goodwill. You are burning real-life money and engineering hours to fix a problem for everyone and ensure that it stays protected under the same Open license that let your company succeed. There is no legal obligation per-se. Open Source is a charity, but you can understand a lot about a company's motives if you compare their FOSS usage to their FOSS contributions.
    - jorvi 3y ago
      I think this misses the point. FAANGs don’t improve OSS code out of goodwill, they do it because it benefits them. Upstreaming those improvements has very little marginal cost, and it bolsters an environment where other companies do the same. Rising tide and all that.
      - sroussey 3y ago
        That is the whole point of GPL — to incentivize contributors for the common good. Goodwill might work for individual contributors, but it’s not enough of an incentive for organizations.
        NegativeK 3y ago
        > it’s not enough of an incentive for organizations. It _should_ be. There's nothing stopping organizations from doing good things except expectation.
        3y ago
curt15 3y ago
btrfs
- Geezus_42 3y ago
  How long have they been working on a stable RAID 5/6 implementation?
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    Why would they? Nobody except a few home users needs RAID 5/6. There's only a small handful of talented filesystem developers (never mind the filesystem, it's equally applicable to all of them), and there's always something to do which will benefit all of us. Especially for something so feature-packed and complicated.
pgwhalen 3y ago
"Giving back" might be an understatement for Meta's open source contributions. They are the bedrock of so much OSS in the last decade, it's everyone _else_ that is "giving back."

londons_explore 3y ago

> yet they donate little or nothing to it, It is all about knowing individual engineers inside these companies. Nearly any engineer in FAANG can, with a little effort, donate their own work time to an opensource project in the form of submitting patches. The project can help in various ways. Make sure licensing stuff is in place so that whatever IP review process the company has goes smoothly. Make sure PR's are reviewed fast. Delegate responsibility ('hi, would you like to be maintainer of this feature?'). Make sure contributions are publicly recognised (ie. Public page of maintainers/biggest contributors). Remember that most engineers inside big companies are trying to generate good content for their performance review. "Wrote and open source some code" is usually one of the checkboxes.

SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
> Nearly any engineer in FAANG can, with a little effort, donate their own work time to an opensource project in the form of submitting patches. I know at least one of those letters that does not want you doing that without jumping through hoops and getting prior approvals. I will let you guess which one that is.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Thats the "with a little effort" bit. But as long as you have a business case (eg. "we are adding this feature for our use, but it will lower our costs if it is upstreamed rather than maintained as a private patch"), it will usually be greenlighted.
atomlib 3y ago
Typically FAANGs have a clause that they own everything that you code even outside of working hours.
- fmajid 3y ago
  No, Meta’s contract has explicit carve-outs for Open-Source work done on personal time that are more generous than Canonical’s (I had to choose between the two 3 months ago). Meta has its own production fork of CPython, Cinder: https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder

ushakov 3y ago

Are the companies at fault for not paying for something that is sold for free? Or do license terms apply differently if you’re Meta?

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

It's easy to blame the boss, but I don't think its the companies responsibility to give back to open source just because they use it. If you think open source is helping you, you could contribute it in your time without expectation to get paid for it. Most open source projects work like this. And if some company needs some extra feature, they should pay market rate for it. Assuming the company doesn't have clause to not allow contributing to open source. These companies should be publicly shamed if they use any open source code.

mickael-kerjean 3y ago
From the many people who asks for things, only a tinny percentage are actually willing to pay for it. Take Microsoft, I had one of their employee asking me to support their azure stuff: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/180 https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/180. When I found out the dude was actually employed by Microsoft, I somehow though he could give a hand, but no he was just there to make some feature request ...

ActorNightly 3y ago

If you are going to attempt to make bombastic criticisms, at least get your facts right. Amazons boss certainly does not sail on a yacht.

synergy20 3y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/style/bezos-yacht-koru.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/style/bezos-yacht-koru.ht..., this is indeed delayed thanks to COVID, it is his own yacht and I am pretty sure he sailed on yachts before building himself one. I had no problems with this by the way, just saying maybe he can contribute 0.001% of his profit to those OSS projects that he depends on, it will help him to build more yachts too.
- ActorNightly 3y ago
  Yeah that fine and all, but the person in the article is not the CEO of Amazon.
kemayo 3y ago
They're referring to Bezos' yacht: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/style/bezos-yacht-koru.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/style/bezos-yacht-koru.ht... One can argue to what extent Bezos is still ultimately "the boss" at Amazon given that he's not the CEO any more, but...

vitus 3y ago

Between pytorch (Meta) and TensorFlow (Alphabet), I'd be surprised if there's much if any ML work today that doesn't rely on OSS projects from FAANG companies. Chromium underpins nearly every major browser that isn't Safari or Firefox. And even more narrowly, V8 powers Node (and Deno). More Google contributions: Angular, Kubernetes, gRPC, Golang. Microsoft: C#, TypeScript, Language Server Protocol, VSCode. Meta: React, zstd, Apache Cassandra, LLAMA. This isn't even getting into open source patches (Google has consistently been one of the top 10 Linux kernel contributors for the last decade), systems papers that have inspired research and other systems (BigTable, Dynamo, MapReduce, Colossus, Spanner), standards work (HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 were both adapted from Google technology), security vulnerability work (Project Zero). (The above list is definitely Google-skewed because that's what I know.)

bee_rider 3y ago
Some of these are great examples. Chrome, though, is a kind of mixed bag. It already has too many features, most likely the reason it underpins so many other browsers is that nobody can keep up with the rate at which Google shovels shit into there. They should slow down. It would be nice if they could just spend a couple years working purely on stability/performance/security, but alternatively they could just stop, it would be better for the ecosystem.
krlacn 3y ago
A lot of these (but not all) strike me a flashy things for which you get promoted. Many people don't need any of these. What FAANG does not do is support critical yet underappreciated Unix infrastructure. By this I mean directly donating to developers without trying to take over the projects. The quality of FAANG code, especially in the fault-tolerant machine learning space, is questionable as well. I'm not sure why so many commenters (in other comments!) attribute near magical qualities to any output of FAANG.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >By this I mean directly donating to developers without trying to take over the projects. FAANG are not charities. If they are sold a license for the software for $0, then they don't have much of reason to pay for it.

weinzierl 3y ago

This is disappointing but certainly not surprising and to some part we as an open source community have to blame our selves. I know it is not a popular opinion but the AGPL is there for a reason. If you release your code under a permissive license you should not be surprised that others benefit from it - sometimes massively. That is how it is supposed to be. You can still lament that it is unjust and I feel you, because in a sense it is. If it really bothers you, the solution is easy. Next time choose the AGPL.

catlifeonmars 3y ago
AGPL is kind of a sledgehammer.
dehrmann 3y ago
I've released open-source projects under an Apache license because I want others to benefit from my work. I knowingly didn't choose GPL-flavored licenses because they limit people's ability to do this.

mliker 3y ago

React, PyTorch, Tensorflow, and many others, all from FAANG. Benefits the ecosystem and their businesses. Not a bad trade.

patrec 3y ago

What did Amazon rip off from you?

kasitmp 3y ago

An interesting example of a big company profiting from open source: Microsoft, going from fighting open source to copilot.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

kylevedder 3y ago

It's stupid sour grapes comments like this that make me hate HN commenters. Meta and Google have both contributed an enormous amount to open source (creating PyTorch, TensorFlow, Chromium, contributing to clang/LLVM, Linux kernel, HTTP standards), but you're mad because they didn't sponsor your work and a bunch of people mindlessly upvoted it.