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Whatever you think of those companies in a wider sense, it's totally inaccurate to suggest that Microsoft, Google or Amazon haven't given anything back to open source.



Hyperbole aside, they certainly haven't given as much as they've gotten, though.

E.g., remember when Heartbleed hit, and the world learned that OpenSSL was maintained by one person getting only $2000/year for it? Fixing Heartbleed was estimated to cost half a billion dollars world-wide.


> Hyperbole aside, they certainly haven't given as much as they've gotten, though.

Agreed, but the point of sharing software is that it's not a zero sum game. The thing you create once is not diminished by me using it many times.


We still have to pay our bills under capitalism, though. Software copies might be infinite, but money isn't.


Of all the people who have to pay their bills under capitalism, why are you specifically concerned about the ones who wrote ElasticSearch and Redis?


Well, ElasticSearch is the topic of the link.

But specifically, those two are examples of companies who started off FOSS, then got exploited by AWS.

Every FS-focused person gives them sh!7, but leaves Amazon off the hook because they exploited under the FS rules, which is an inversion of who actually does harm in the world.


Hot take: lots of widely popular open source software only exists because mega corps developed and released it.

Reference: most software in the Apache Foundation and huge portion of the container ecosystem.




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