[yc_2345]

GP has a good point.

Here is the general FOSS playbook of nearly every Big Tech company.

1 Use FOSS as a way to attract the best talent in addition to the salary. But remember that even a very high salary for a permanently scandalous company like Facebook may not be a good enough incentive, but FOSS will likely push some folks over the fence. ("Yes, I work for Microsoft. But inside Microsoft, I work on FOSS stuff!" - Scott Hanselman).

2 Get a lot of unpaid volunteers looking at and improving your code, not to mention the free documentation and all the free support on the project's GitHub issues.

3 Cherry pick the interesting stuff in the FOSS projects for BigTechCo employees and hand off the more boring plumbing work to the unpaid volunteers, thus massively increasing total FOSS output. This can often be done by simply ignoring the boring stuff for a while since it is quite clear that FOSS devotees abhor the code vacuum.

4 Back to step 1.

Yes, FOSS seems to be perpetuating the tech monopoly.