This is a good point, but I think there are some unfortunate side effects. Once you give away free stuff because you used someone's (open sourced) code, now you have to get the PR people involved. In the future if your devs see some other open sourced code that they want to use, now instead of needing to get legal on board they also need to get PR on board.

"Oh, hm, well we don't really want to give away free consoles this time around. And if we don't then it will make us look bad because we did last time. So don't use that code."

As a dev, I don't really want to have to check with 50 other divisions in the company before I use some open sourced stuff. And then get denied because of some unrelated PR event is going on.

I generally agree with this school of thought. Acknowledgement whether necessary or not is just a nice gesture and it would be great if more companies did it with the open source code they are (presumably) using in line with the license.

But, as soon as you start paying, you have: 1.) All the other open source code they're presumably using possibly in more trivial ways and 2.) As soon as money enters the question it can become a matter of "My library probably saved Nintendo tens of thousands of dollars in development costs and all I got is this lousy console. No wonder people say open source development isn't sustainable." (Whether that was the case here or not.) It might have been a nice gesture but it could easily be taken the wrong way.

I'm in two minds about that, at first I thought exactly the same.

But then you might think, for some things anyway, Wait a minute, you're recognising the value you get out of it... and you're valuing it at only ~£300 (or whatever).

I think 'just trying to be nice' could back-fire.

Yes but that should be an organic thing from within Nintendo.

On the other hand pushing it hard so it becomes a 'thing' would leave a bad taste in my mouth. Although rewarding OSS is something every major company should strive for (In Nintendos case specifically I'd be personally be surprised given what I've heard about Japanese corporate culture, but I'm just speculating here).

But it is indeed a good marketing strategy, at least if the HR and marketing teams were even aware of such things (ie, people who have control of sending out freebies). Which is why having technical leadership throughout the company always helps. Ultimately it will come down to an organizational thing.

What companies like Nintendo should do is to sign up for OSS support services like https://www.tidelift.com/, and whether they have or haven’t we don’t know.

Sending out free consoles would just be a marketing gimmick, and could just as well backfire as “you can’t eat a console, do Nintendo really think consoles are the way to support open source maintainers?” etc

exactly, corporate altruism has so many ways of backfiring, your example is one great example. I can just imagine the sort of mental gymnastics Twitterers will find to be outraged at any x billion dollar company efforts to do low-tier outreach with freebies.

Just simply supporting OSS directly, as in real money, is more than enough to quiet these "they should give x freebie".

That is all the mob should be calling for as a standard practice. Not sending some random developer who happened to get popular on Twitter a nintendo.