Every example I can think of in which a large corporation is heavily involved in an open standard which manages to gain meaningful traction ends in some major iteration of that technology being a massive corporate funnel for them (Android is the prime example of this: it’s like if you had to buy Coca Cola every time you bought a drinking glass). So what’s the hope here? That these projects will be able to use this corporate money as a launchpad? It’s never happened.
One could argue we’ve gotten a lot of developer tools this way, and while I think that’s true, their impact on the average non-developer in their everyday life is nothing compared to the massive international negative impact of the company’s business (I’d happily give up my knowledge of React if you told me it would be harder for the Myanmar government to spread propaganda).
I think we are very inclined to talk ideologically or in abstract about massive corporations funding FOSS projects and conferences, but one need only look at reality to see this has been going on for decades and things like privacy and openness have very much not made progress (privacy has almost certainly gotten worse at an accelerated rate).
There is a status quo being maintained. The humane methods haven’t fallen out of any of the corporate money being thrown around over the years. It seems unlikely to me that this would change when things are as bad as ever.
If anything, the absurdity of Google or Facebook being involved in any way whatsoever with privacy conferences should be, at a bare minimum, leading to boycotts (but now I’m being unrealistic about the demographic of people in tech.)
@cwebber@aral Aral's implicit point here (and explicitly... everywhere else) is that to consider this money as being "no strings attached" is a fallacy. The idea that these companies do a lot of taking and not enough giving presupposes that the giving they do isn't part-and-parcel with the taking in the first place (which, again, is Aral's overarching point here).
It seems shallowly utilitarian (if the calculus is even right) to say that multinational corporations with a parasitic business model are doing something good when they throw their weight around in free software.
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