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Title: Remember the Companies Making Vital Open Source Contributions

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/1749...

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 as the then-COO of
Canonical. Today he runs developer marketing at Oracle (after holding similar
positions at AWS, Adobe, and MongoDB). And this week Asay contributed an
opinion piece to InfoWorld reminding us of open source contributions from
companies where "enlightened self-interest underwrites the boring but vital
work - CI hardware, security audits, long-term maintenance - that grassroots
volunteers struggle to fund." [I]f you look at the Linux 6.15 kernel
contributor list (as just one example), the top contributor, as measured by
change sets, is Intel... Another example: Take the last year of contributions
to Kubernetes. Google (of course), Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and AWS all
headline the list. Not because it's sexy, but because they make billions of
dollars selling Kubernetes services... Some companies (including mine) sell
proprietary software, and so it's easy to mentally bucket these vendors with
license fees or closed cloud services. That bias makes it easy to ignore
empirical contribution data, which indicates open source contributions on a
grand scale. Asay notes Oracle's many contributions to Linux: In the [Linux
kernel] 6.1 release cycle, Oracle emerged as the top contributor by lines of
code changed across the entire kernel... [I]t's Oracle that patches memory-
management structures and shepherds block-device drivers for the Linux we all
use. Oracle's kernel work isn't a one-off either. A few releases earlier, the
company topped the "core of the kernel" leaderboard in 5.18, and it hasn't
slowed down since, helping land the Maple Tree data structure and other
performance boosters. Those patches power Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI),
of course, but they also speed up Ubuntu on your old ThinkPad. Self-
interested contributions? Absolutely. Public benefit? Equally absolute. This
isn't just an Oracle thing. When we widen the lens beyond Oracle, the pattern
holds. In 2023, I wrote about Amazon's "quiet open source revolution,"
showing how AWS was suddenly everywhere in GitHub commit logs despite the
company's earlier reticence. (Disclosure: I used to run AWS' open source
strategy and marketing team.) Back in 2017, I argued that cloud vendors were
open sourcing code as on-ramps to proprietary services rather than end-
products. Both observations remain true, but they miss a larger point:
Motives aside, the code flows and the community benefits. If you care about
outcomes, the motives don't really matter. Or maybe they do: It's far more
sustainable to have companies contributing because it helps them deliver
revenue than to contribute out of charity. The former is durable; the latter
is not. There's another practical consideration: scale. "Large vendors wield
resources that community projects can't match." Asay closes by urging readers
to "Follow the commits" and "embrace mixed motives... the point isn't
sainthood; it's sustainable, shared innovation. Every company (and really
every developer) contributes out of some form of self-interest. That's the
rule, not the exception. Embrace it." Going forward, we should expect to see
even more counterintuitive contributor lists. Generative AI is turbocharging
code generation, but someone still has to integrate those patches, write
tests, and shepherd them upstream. The companies with the most to lose from
brittle infrastructure - cloud providers, database vendors, silicon makers -
will foot the bill. If history is a guide, they'll do so quietly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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