Open Source Arms Race

Some companies massively invest in open source software projects,
while others still remain skeptical and stay away from this trend.
What’s in it for those philanthropists, like Google, IBM or Microsoft?
Why spend money on something that doesn’t belong to them and
is shared among all of us developers? Don’t they understand that
the code they write may be used by their competitors? It seems they
do understand, but can’t do anything about it.

Filth (2013) by Jon S. Baird As David Mytton
noted ,
individuals release open source projects out of altruism,
while companies have real, strategic reasons hidden behind
the warm and fuzzy glow of open source. We don’t mean just using
open source products, which is what every business
does
nowadays, but building them so that everybody can use them, for free.

First, let’s see exactly how,
among other methods ,
companies invest in open source:

Committers .
Google, for example, encourages its employees to
open their code, and even has an
approval procedure for it.
It seems that others do something similar.
Some recently published research
demonstrates that thousands (!) of employees from
Microsoft (4.3k visible GitHub contributors),
IBM (2.3k),
Google (1.2k),
and
others
actively contribute to their GitHub-hosted repositories.
In other words, being paid by Google these people write
code that doesn’t belong to Google.

Events .
Aside from
Google Cloud Next ,
AWS re:Invent , and
Microsoft Ignite ,
which are pure promotional events, tech giants sponsor
community-driven conferences, like
DockerCon ,
KubeCon ,
FOSDEM ,
and so on.

Foundations .
Apache ,
Linux ,
Eclipse ,
GNOME ,
OSI
and others
are sponsored by Google, IBM, Huawei, Microsoft, Oracle, and others.

Acquisitions .
They acquire
startups that make open source products,
e.g.
RedHat
(acquired by IBM for $32b ),
MongoDB
( $4b ),
Docker
( $1b ),
Elastic
( $6b ),
Ansible
( $100m ),
MySQL
( $1b ),
Nginx
( $670m ),
and so on .
The market is booming , by the way.

Donations .
Google, for example, donates to
Fastlane
and
Kubernetes ;
IBM donates to
Node.js
and
TensorFlow ;
Amazon sponsors
Rust ;
and so on .

Next, the question is how this helps Google and others make their
business more profitable. For example, how is Google Cloud Platform planning
to beat Amazon AWS using open source as a weapon? Here is...