Does anyone actually believe that? Why does Google sponsor Gnome, KDE, GIMP, LibreOffice, Open Street Maps?
Something is very suspicious
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1 dayIt allows them to tell the antitrust regulators they are not a monopoly. “See? We’re fostering competition!”
That is not new. They’ve been doing that since the 2000s.
The way I understand it is that there are at least two reasons, maybe more:
- Google (like all tech companies) uses a lot of open source software internally, so benefits from it being improved
- Google wants to train possible future employees
Not everything Google or other big tech companies do is necessarily bad; we should be taking advantage of the good parts of what they do.
- 1 day
Yeah it’s definitely targeted at graduates making their first contributions / building a portfolio, but not for anything sustained.
- 21 hours
Oh yes, Google and also MS are the biggest distributers and developers of OpenSource, it’s true, but also for own advantages with inbuild tracking and profiling APIs, best example Chromium or Android as is, full FOSS, but a lot of work for companies and devs which want to use it, to kick out all the Google tracking crap it has by default.
To be clear, OpenSource is great for develope and distribute software, but it’s a big mistake to think that FOSS is synonym of privacy and security, this depends only on the author and what he pretend with it, very debatable in case of big corps like Google, MS, Amazon and Facebook. That they sponser other OpenSource projects means nothing, when they can use it by themselfs (apart of the sign in with Google option which some show) or maybe obtain the pemission to include their APIs, apart of tax advantages.
For sure are tecnically high quality products, but there are alternatives with equal quality by start-ups and some devs, without all the spyware from big brothers, they always preferable. FOSS also has a lot of different licenses, which is mandatory to read to know what is allowed to do with it and what not, not always so open. The only real free license is this one.
In software it’s always mandatory to read TOS and PP, if it has a good support and community, if it has a good maintance with regular updates, if it don’t track you or sell your data to third party as business model. Irrelevant if it is FOSS or not.
There are many, varied motivations for contributing to open source projects, and most of them aren’t a sense of altruism.
It’s great PR to market open source in utopian terms, but the reality is far more complicated.
The Apache web server wasn’t created out of the goodness of people’s hearts but out of mid-90s internet startups’ need for a reliable, scalable platform on which to profitably run services.
Unfortunately the ruling that corporations are people (and thus have the right to free speech via giving donating to political campaigns), was a real downgrade for people.
Maybe its a nti-competitive business strategy Check this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
