Many companies seem to be able to benefit in various ways from contributing to open source / free software.
Examples:
- Chromium and Android obviously benefits Google as it makes it easier to ensure adds get through
- Also, they limit the ability of Apple/Microsoft to control those revenue streams in their walled gardens
- Hardware and software vendors benefit from making sure Linux works well with their products
- Making TensorFlow free helps build a community that in turn makes hiring easier.
- Contributing to Torch may protect against a monopoly
- Contributing to other R or Python machine learning tools may help limit the power of companies like SAS or IBM/SPSS
- Similarly, contributions to Postgres/Mongo etc wrestles power away from Oracle, MS (MSSQL) and IBM (DB2).
- More of the same: Proton vs DirectX, OpenCL vs Cuda, FidelityFX vs DLSS. When a competitor tries to establish a standard that is either paid for or limited or proprietary in some other way, providing or contributing to open alternatives may be easier to do than to provide a direct proprietary competitor.
- DataBricks founders benefit from being part of the creation of Spark, and can get paid for adding further value.
Many of the above are cases where large to huge corporations use their power to disrupt competitors by providing free alternatives in areas where the has some market dominance. Other contributions assist in delivering a basic product for free while getting paid for products that add value on top.
