You seem to know a surprising amount about (a) the significance of a regex library to security companies and (b) the business reasons for open sourcing it. Perhaps you were there at Intel, or one of our customers, and I just don't recognize your Hacker News id?

To fill in: many security products put almost every packet on the wire past our library, sometimes multiple times. This wasn't a product used to, I dunno, validate user fields or something. Companies used to build hardware to do this, many of which are now pushing up the daisies (I like to think in part due to our work), and we got quite a nice acquisition out of it (while still open source).

I actually expected $0 from open sourcing it and was not surprised - the business reasons had absolutely nothing to do with direct revenue (which honestly would have been an enormous hassle to collect). I was still wowed at how standoffish a lot of our customers were (to the point of having 'secret' customers we found with detective work). My real complaint wasn't about money, it was about companies giving pretty much zero recognition to OSS groups at other companies upon use of their s/w - they shouldn't be surprised when, as a result, the infrastructure they depend on rots away.

But hey, they can "figure stuff out themselves". Maybe...

Your point is well taken, and what I suspect is the issue is something that I learned quite a while ago: people just cannot value what they get for free.

That’s not a statement of moral or ethical anything, just a impartial statement of a basic generalized truth.

> it was about companies giving pretty much zero recognition to OSS groups at other companies upon use of their s/w - they shouldn't be surprised when, as a result, the infrastructure they depend on rots away

Why would they care? Businesses were happy to pay these hardware companies that you deride for their devices, they're more than happy to use your library as long as it is gratis, and they'd be perfectly happy to pay other companies for replacement software if your library stopped functioning or ceased to exist.

The broad adoption of FOSS has nothing to do with ideology or community and it never did. FOSS is widely used primarily because it is gratis and frees up money to be spent on something else.

Uh, so they will be perfectly happy to pay for something (not to mention change their code and go through the fun of dealing with contracts) they were previously getting for free - rather than, say, send a nice email to a private address or some relationship manager. Yes, this makes total sense.

There sure are a lot of HN folks out there who apparently understand the ins and outs of corporate OSS way better than I do. Apparently I'm a wide-eyed naif who thought that OSS was all about community, and need to be set straight by one HN cynic after another.