[neilparikh]

I'm skeptical that OSS actually provides that much free work for big companies. If you look at React for example, 25 out of the top 30 contributors are FB employees. The other 5 might have been as well, I just couldn't tell. If, for some reason, no one outside FB contributed to React, I doubt it would affect FB at all. The few commits that come externally would just be written in house.

I think looking at other corporate run project (VSCode, Kubernetes etc.) will tell a similar story: the vast majority of the code will be written by the employees of the company owning the project in the first place.

You could argue that companies are getting free bug reports, but users are probably reporting bugs because they find value in the tool, and would like it to be better, so it's hardly parasitic there either.

[DreamScatter]

You picked a bag example, look for a project that isn't owned by a big company but still used by them, like OpenSSL