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nick238 | 3 months ago

From my time working at a Fortune 100 company, if I ever mentioned pushing even small patches to libraries we effing used, I'd just be met "try to focus on your tickets". Their OSS library and policies were also super byzantine, seemingly needing review of everything you'd release, but the few times I tried to do it the official way, I just never heard anything back from the black-hole mailing list you were supposed to contact.

Yes, I've also worked on OpenStack components at a university, and there I see Red Hat or IBM employees pushing up loads of changes. I don't know if I've ever seen a Walmart, UnitedHealth, Chase Bank, or Exxon Mobil (to pick some of the largest companies) email address push changes.

discuss

nradov|3 months ago

I don't know about ExxonMobil but Walmart, UnitedHealth Group, and JPMorganChase employees do actively contribute to open source projects. Maybe just not the ones you used. They have also published some of their own.

https://github.com/walmartlabs

https://github.com/Optum

https://github.com/jpmorganchase

ecshafer|3 months ago

To steelman this: I've never worked at any of the companies you listed but most likely Red Hat and IBM employees (Is there still a difference?) are being paid specifically to work on Openstack, as they get money from support contracts. When Walmart of Chase use Openstack there is a rather small team who is implementing openstack to be used as a platform. They are then paying IBM/Redhat for that support. There probably isn't really the expertise in the Openstack team at Warlmart to be adding patches. Some companies spend a different amount of money on in house technology than others, and then open source it.

7e|3 months ago

Those aren’t tech giants. They're just shit companies. I agree they greatly outnumber Big Tech, in employees if not talent.

nradov|3 months ago

Check again. The Optum unit of UnitedHealth Group has huge revenue from software and technical services. If just that part of the business was spun out it would be one of the top 20 US tech companies.

ezconnect|3 months ago

Walmart is a tech giant.