There really isn't any way to confirm or refute that kind of argument. What would happen if regulation or social norms or whatever prevented big tech companies from existing? I don't know and (frankly) you don't either.

I use emacs a dozen plus hours a day, and GNU wouldn't exist if RMS hadn't been bullied at the lunch room in the MIT AI Lab. Would the world be a better or worse place if he didn't have a personal jihad against Symbolics draped in a GNU bumper sticker?

I don't know.

I'm kind of confused but maybe it's my age. My career ran parallel to the birth of open source and it was explicitly a reaction against megacorps behavior and practices.

The participation in it part is newer, they were initially very hostile (I was warned any number of times aligning strategies against oss projects incase it was 'detrimental to my career')

The thing about reading GNU mailing lists is that they're so, I don't know, intimate or something. They're freely available for anyone to read, but community members talk so openly on them that you feel like you're wire-tapping someone's living room.

I've had enough professional stuff on the line to need to pay attention to GNU over the years even though it always creeped me out a little bit, and I don't see how anyone can read them without concluding that Stallman feeling personally slighted was the reason he went on the crusade, and the software freedom thing was a reasonably comfortable paintjob.

He got picked last for Symbolics, the LMI people didn't really want him around either but were getting clobbered on defense contracts so they kind of couldn't turn down his code (he's a great hacker), and the rest is sort of history until Linus comes along right?

Yeah, I agree. I distinctly remember open source becoming more corporate as the years got by, and corporate becoming more open source aligned.

Of course, but you don't know either. So your argument that these (or equivalent) contributions wouldn't exist without the megacorps doesn't hold.

It's dramatically easier to prove to a reasonable observer that Kubernetes got lifted off the ground by a bunch of folks on Google payroll than it is to prove that some GNU diehard would have inevitably sold that (silly) idea to like a zillion people if only Google didn't beat them to it.

I make these sort of observations with a certain regret: I was a kid already pushing the limits on a DOS-type machine when you could first get Slackware media: the GNU userspace has been home since before I ever woke up next to a girl.

But it's kinda over now. LLVM vs. GCC is a desperate rearguard action, the Rust people have broken the mindshare monopoly on shared libraries that was insulating `glibc` from it's better (`musl` in almost every case is better), old-timers like me are me are a bit attached to emacs and bash, but neovim and fish are pretty fucking good.

GNU and free software in general are no longer superior by virtue of Sun Microsystems leaning too hard into the JVM: they've got to work for it now, and they're getting their asses kicked.

That's taking it to extreme, though. It's possible that a large number of medium companies, for instance, would have the same open source yield as the megacorps who just bought them out (in our reality). Especially if it were easier for them to attract more talented engineers, which would be the case if the big companies had less of a grip on the existing market (e.g. if Meta were forced to split up, as regulators push for)

Sidebar: I don't know what "tech-washing" means. When I see that a company is laundering some bias or some social advantage through a machine learning model I just call it money laundering, because the inputs and outputs are both money and I think we've coined enough new victimhood words per year every year for many years.

If a company is profiting off it's "open-source" contributions, getting out more than it's putting in, then it's washing money through GitHub I guess. That's fair.

But "tech-washing" has this implication that any computer hacker is in a bad way, which is just silly: back when we had to go to the office the freeway overpasses we drove on had tent encampments under them.

Take that up with the Ayn Rand idiots who are not uncommon in these parts.

By "techwashing" I mean using some of the money a company makes in its main business (which in the case of Meta and some other corporates has a bad impact on society) to make a positive technical contribution to the public , thus helping existing and prospective employees work there with less of a guilty conscience.

Similar, to e.g. a pharmaceutical company raising the price of a medicine excessively, but then donating some of the money to build a hospital.

It's just that in the case of tech companies, the reputation washing is done via technical contributions.