[blendergeek]

It's why I don't understand why people believe in "open source". Why would I contribute free dev work to a billion dollar corporation? I do believe in "Free Software" which is contributing free dev work to my fellow man for the benefit of all man mankind.

[CharlesW]

This may be a misconception. "Free software" (e.g. Linux) also benefits billion-dollar corporations and "open source" also benefits all mankind.

[blendergeek]

Free software and open source are two ideologies for the same thing. Free Software is the ideology of developing the software for the benefit of mankind (it's sometimes termed a "political" stance but I see it as an ethical stance). Open source is the ideology of saving money at a corporation by not paying the developers. Sure open source can benefit mankind but will only develop corporate software for money. When developing on my own time, I will focus on software that either personally benefits me or benefits other regular people.

[NoOn3]

at least under some licenses like GPL/AGPL you get some code back.

[eastbound]

> Why would I contribute free dev work to a billion dollar corporation?

The billion dollars company contributed more to your startup than you do to them. Microsoft provides:

- VSCode,

- Hosts all NPM repositories. You know, the ones small startups are too lazy to cache (also because it’s much harder to cache NPM repositories than Maven) and then you re-download them at each build,

- Typescript

[wkat4242]

Meh it depends whether you use those things of course. There's other IDEs, other languages. And Microsoft isn't doing this out of charity. A lot of the really useful plugins are not working on the open source version, so people that use them provide telemetry which is probably valuable. Or they use it as a gateway to their services like GitHub Copilot.

If a mega corporation gives you something for free it's always more beneficial to them otherwise they wouldn't do it in the first place.

[exe34]

I think the argument is that when big companies make use of stuff, it gets more scrutiny and occasionally they contribute back improvements, and the occasional unicorn gets actual man hours paid for improving it. So if your project gets big enough, it's beneficial. But you have to have a MIT/BSD license usually, because companies will normally stay away from GPL.

[victorbjorklund]

Why do basic science which benefits everyone else for free?