They can secure the dominance of their offering against the open source competition for well under 500k a year. It's a no brainer.
What this might look like would be say, poorly discernable icons, clumsy UI design, or an unstable API that makes plugins constantly break. Large volumes of documentation that are inadequate or inaccurate in critical places, etc.
If I was malicious I'd pay someone to write otherwise functional code and bug fixes but make really user hostile decisions whenever possible.
We should be diligent for this in a few key projects. Tech companies could easily be doing this already.
There are levels of skull duggery. Hiring someone to pretend to work for a competitor while secretly sabotaging them is a whole other level of skullduggery with a lot of liability attached. I don't think that would be worth it to them.
Like shooting a whistle blower?
It is probably prudent for you (and other like-minded individuals) to be more careful who you think your enemies really are. Infighting against friends and allies, or even neutral parties, is exactly what your real enemies would want you to do.
2. Make them contribute to a competing open source project.
3. Profit!
Even paying a cutout consulting company to do it would be iffy since so many finance employees would be involved in paying them, it would leak sooner than later - or at least raise a lot of questions that would be hard to answer legitimately. Being a public company, also hard to avoid auditor scrutiny.
Even a private company would have an easier time.
Nation state actors though? No such issues - that’s literally why security clearances, compartmentalization, and ‘you never really leave’ are done the way they are.
And they don’t have to worry about market blowback unless they get really excessively heavy handed (like France did in the late 80’s-90’s). They are setup to do shady stuff, it’s their raison d'etre.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#:~:text....]
Microsoft and Adobe have reputations to uphold long into the future.
Is that infallible? Hell no it isn't, but consider that Jia Tan only needed to uphold his reputation insofar as getting his backdoor onto everyone's systems. Once that is done, his reputation or the lack thereof becomes a non-issue because his work is done. We're lucky we caught him just before the finish line.
The likelihood of demonstrably reputable parties like Microsoft and Adobe poisoning the well is practically nil because they don't have a finish line.