[waisbrot]

> Google summer of code

Trains and evaluates young engineers either for them to hire or to work in their ecosystem

> $100 Million per year for non-profits

PR, taxes, and as the article describes, leverage.

> OSS releases

Giving things out for free helps pull everyone into your ecosystem.

> Of course you can say that this is motivated by PR objectives. But then you're creating a situation where they couldn't do anything right.

This is true. The only way for a company to be truly altruistic in a capitalist system is to be irrational: donate anonymously to organizations that oppose it, buy commercial time and then air white noise to block other groups from political ads. No company is going to do that (or if they do they won't last long).

There's no real solution that involves "tsk"ing at Google or trying to shame them into "doing the right thing". That has to come from outside.

[hodgesrm]

At worst this looks like enlightened self-interest. You don't have to be a fan-boi to see there's there's a difference between Google and companies like Massey Energy (29 dead after flagrant safety violations [0]) and Enron (massive accounting fraud [1]). Making it a binary choice between altruistic/not erases any differences in corporate behavior when in fact there are practical distinctions with direct effects on the lives of employees, customers, and society at large.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massey_Energy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron