[Vesuvium]

Corporations have been using open source to exert technological dominance and push standards that favour their agenda for some time. It's proving so effective to have direct control on software and standards that more and more companies are engaging into this activity.

Certain tools come with telemetry that is used to track the users. On top of this, by making open source these corporations are seen as good for the community by naive engineers.

You can find here on HN articles that talk about how Google is using Chrome to bend the web to its will, how Visual Studio Code tracks its users and how Facebook uses its Android SDK to track smartphones. JetBrains declared they made Kotlin with the intent of gaining an edge on competition for Java IDEs (no spying intent declared or reported, but I want to highlight that even for a $300 million company technological domain is proving effective).

Tencent is merely doing what other corporations have been doing for decades.