> If big boys take out the funding from key projects, meaning stop paying their employees to contribute, everything would crumble.
What's your point? If Microsoft goes bankrupt, the MS ecosystem would crumble. And so on, ad infinitum. Nothing lasts forever. Since people aren't clairvoyant, they make an effort at evaluating risks vs benefits, and end up continuing to use both MS products and FOSS software.
> Why do they pay? As means to drive ecosystems into the products that actually provide money, like cloud, SaaS and hardware, closed source.
Yes, that's that whole 'commodify your complement' thing I mentioned. But so what? As long as those companies contribute free software that is useful, enjoy the ride. Maybe the current privacy-invading ad funded IT hegemons will fail one day and be replaced by something else, but at least whatever comes next will have a big pool of hopefully useful software to start building on top of.
