[jrochkind1]

If $500K is such great PR that it's worth it to the company, I hope we can see a bunch of other companies (and, hey, divisions of Microsoft) do it too!

Presumably people are just as or even more upset at all the other companies who use open source internally but don't give cash like this to large numbers of open source projects? Right? [insert Anakin Padme meme] If all big companies donated $500K a year to open source, that'd be a pretty significant change in the environment, wouldn't it?

I have noticed for a while that HN comments lean really anti-Github. I don't really understand why.

[jcouball]

If this thread is indicative of the PR companies would receive, they won’t contribute in this way.

Just because GitHub might get something out of it does not make it bad.

[heurisko]

> If all big companies donated $500K a year to open source, that'd be a pretty significant change in the environment, wouldn't it?

If those other companies stood to gain as much for $500K spent on marketing, they'd be doing it too.

GitHub isn't somehow more benevolent than all the others. I happen to like GitHub for the product it provides. I just find corporate marketing using maintainers as a proxy is lame. But good for the people who received the money, however.