> That's why they need to fund open source.
They do. They pay employees to work on software they contribute to the open-source community. To build React, Facebook had to rely on "20 years of R&D" but also millions of dollars in engineering hours.
Why should the resources not come from the companies extracting the most cash value from open source?
It does not fund the tools that power their current open source projects.
It does not fund the tools their next open source projects will use.
It does not fund the brilliance their next open source projects will iterate on.
It does not fund the mistakes their next open source projects will know to avoid.
They need all of that stuff before they have even a clue what to make next, and they need the open source community to try everything a hundred different ways to see which is good.
We will still be arguing about this in twenty years as open source transitions into a mostly Indo-Chino-Russo-African dominated landscape because western developers can't afford to work on open source unless it's through their employing-FAANG company.
Long before that all the current FAANG open source we're supposed to be grateful to receive instead of funding will be obsoleted and tossed aside because only a handful of ideas in it actually mattered after all.
As I already stated, yes, it does fund open source. That's literally what they're doing: spending funds on developing and maintaining open source code. Did they fund every transient piece of software in the technology stack? Of course not.
It does not fund the...
Corporate money funds all of those things you listed. No, not every single package that becomes popular, but many of them, including many informed by practical knowledge acquired through battle-tested experience operating such software in their businesses.
> western developers can't afford to work on open source unless it's at a FAANG company.
So what? If western developers can't afford to work on open-source software they shouldn't. I wouldn't expect anyone to work for free if they couldn't afford to do so.
The so-what is software development evolution comes to a grinding halt while we wait for third-world and developing countries to hit the sweet spot where people can afford to pursue their art and afford the tools and connectivity it requires and afford the many years of learning to understand the steps between hello world and inventing kubernetes. Google didn't even invent kubernetes as much as they extrapolated to it from experience and open source.
I think it's fair for developers to charge (or otherwise monetize, including ads) for their software, even if they open-source it, but they don't "need" funding any more than any other arbitrary piece of software that someone somewhere thinks should exist.
> software development evolution comes to a grinding halt
What's wrong with this? If "software development evolution comes to a grinding halt" then it means we didn't need any more new software and existing solutions have solved all problems.
And the low-quality stuff is super-important too. Before someone can work at FAANG they need to write good software. Before they can write good software they're going to practice writing all kinds of dumb shit and good stuff building the experience and knowledge required to invent a kubernetes. The time investment to obtain the skillset to work for FAANG is years. It requires hardware and connectivity.
The problem with it coming to a grinding halt is we're obviously not finished yet. In ten years React should be in the trash like literally everything that preceded it is. We might still be using Flash if we were finished. Its syntax sure looks like it lent TypeScript some ideas.
What if software genius like Torvalds isn't even rare and we're still just too stupid to foster and enable it for common good...
That's a tautology. They decided to monetize their open-source work through ads. I don't disagree with this approach, if users don't like the ads then don't use the software. That doesn't mean companies need to arbitrarily fund that project.
> Before they can write good software they're going to practice writing all kinds of dumb shit and good stuff building the experience and knowledge required to invent a kubernetes.
So what? They can write lots of practice software and not open-source it. Why should anyone be paying for them to do so?
> The problem with it coming to a grinding halt is we're obviously not finished yet. In ten years React should be in the trash like literally everything that preceded it is. We might still be using Flash if we were finished. Its syntax sure looks like it lent TypeScript some ideas.
If it should be so then it will be so. People will write software if there is a need for it. There is no inherent reason why React "should" be in the trash in 10 years, it will be in the trash only if new problems need to be solved and if they do someone will attempt to solve them.
This is easy to answer: Because most/all those open source writers explicitly said it's OK for the users of their software not to provide them cash for it. If I openly say you can use my stuff for free, and then later come and say you are morally obligated to pay me because you made huge profit from my stuff, then my integrity is compromised.
It's totally fine to say "I will no longer respond to support tickets for free", though.
Without it what do they base decisions on? React would be guesswork or an internal tool built in isolation that only solves their specific problems if even that good.
This is how software is evolving. If there is no parallel evolution it will take 1000x longer to do so. If it takes 1000x longer to evolve it takes 1000x longer to invent opportunity and savings for FAANG.
That's not so much a solution, but a new problem: how to get FAANG to actually do that?
We look for 100,000 individual solutions to making rent while FAANG are just sitting there with a quarter trillion plus in cash waiting to benefit from the best everything that emerges from this massive, free R&D pipeline. Take the best ideas, hire the best programmers, copy the best software, adopt the best practices. From top to bottom you could probably find 10,000+ open source contributors across their stacks, and to enable that open source software required even more contributors, and influencing it all was the previous generations of contributors.
I think the best solution is FAANG pay it forward and support the entire opensource R&D pipeline that enables them to hoard so much money. Between them they hire more people than there are open source developers so it's ridiculous they cannot support them all. It's a security issue that they do not support them at all for the most part, like with OpenSSL, like with injecting ads into node modules, like with selling modules to be repurposed as malware. We haven't even found the stuff compromised by state agencies yet.