I would like to vent out some grievances against large corporations (including personally me), mostly IT giants, whose entire lines of businesses are dependent on open source software. Most of these corporations use FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for almost everything Engineering related. They do not spend a dime on the languages, tools and frameworks that create the applications for their clients whom they charge exorbitantly.

Let’s take just one ecosystem - Java. It serves the biggest chunk of the IT application development/maintenance business, right from the language itself, to related frameworks. Let me list some tools used almost everywhere.

OS: Linux

Languages: Java

Frameworks: Struts, Spring, Hibernate, Play, JUnit, Cucumber etc.

CI/CD: Jenkins, GoCD etc.

Servers: Apache, Tomcat, JBoss

Databases: MySql, Postgres, Mongo etc.

Productivity: Libreoffice, OpenOffice etc.

…And endless other software, tools and frameworks for message queuing, machine learning etc. without which their entire IT business would be financially unsustainable. And this is only the Java Ecosystem, there are numerous others like the JavaScript, Ruby/Rails, Test frameworks etc. The breadth is staggering.

These corporations reap all the benefits of FOSS while giving back next to nothing.

In fact, when developers wish to voluntarily contribute to open source, the corporate legal teams often bring out clauses, something like “All software developed within the company and with its resources will be company’s IP exclusively in all respects, explicit or otherwise”. These are legally binding, they say.

One can only conclude that these IT corps are leeches feeding on the open source contributors and maintainers. It only makes financial sense to remember that Open Source contribution is a sort of risk hedging.