Without the backing and investments of commercial companies, Linux would not be the success it currently is. So in the end everyone benefits in some way, although maybe not financially.
Same goes for a lot of other succesfull opensource projects: without commercial backing it would not be as succesfull.
why does anything have to be altruistic? Why can't a company invest in OSS selfishly? The results are the same - more OSS available for anybody else to use.
> OSS developers aren't winning.
what's "winning" here? Is winning gaining financial profit from OSS? Is winning gaining user/market share? Is winning just merely being employed to do what you want to (i.e., employed to contribute to OSS)? And why is any one of those definitions more worthy than any other?
It doesn't benefit everyone, it benefits anyone using their proprietary and OSS products and cloud services. It definitely doesn't benefit existing OSS projects who are seeing their innovations replicated by full-time resources or OSS developers working on competing projects.
By no means are their OSS investments altruistic, Cloud companies by far benefit the most from OSS and no OSS developers aren't winning. Being able to hire OSS developers using funds generated from hosting their OSS efforts is some weird definition of winning, which they're using towards strengthening the software ecosystem around their cloud infrastructure - increasing its value.
The power and value of OSS is swinging sharply away from Indie OSS developers towards the major tech cloud monopolies - where they can now afford to outspend, out compete, out reach and out last any competing Indie OSS efforts.