I wonder if companies open-source stuff mainly as part of a bigger strategy which primarily benefits them. could it be a way to access to a pool of free, contributing talent?
You mean like StarOffice being open sourced as OpenOffice to attempt to undermine Microsoft Office revenue a couple of decades ago? To quote Bugs Bunny, "Myeah, could be..."
why would companies not do things that benefit them? and if it's meant pessimistically, let me take you back to a much worse time when Microsoft didn't open source anything
Why was this flagged? This isn't even a secret, a lot of SaaS companies will open source parts of their offerings to increase adoption, making the money back when larger orgs now want to use it, and are willing to pay for enterprise support plans to get the service straight from the horse's mouth.
I think it's a fair exchange too, even as an individual I pay for plenty of smaller open-source SaaS services—even if they're more expensive than proprietary competitors—for the very reason that I could always selfhost it without interruption if SHTF and the provider goes under.
Would really be curious to hear the reason why, from an internal perspective.
I've seen a number of theories online that boil down to young tech enthusiasts in the 2000's/early-2010's getting hands-on experience with open source projects and ecosystems since they're more accessible than enterprise tech that's typically gated behind paywalls, then translating into what they use when they enter the working world (where some naturally end up at M$).
This somewhat seems to track, as longtime M$ employees from the Ballmer-era still often hold stigmas against open source projects (Dave's garage, and similar), but it seems the current iteration of employees hold much more favorable views.
But who knows, perhaps it's all one long-winded goal from M$ of embracing, extending, and ultimately extinguishing.
The same reason Rome didn’t fall. It simply turned into the Church.
MS isn’t battling software mfgs because they have the lock on hardware direction and operating systems so strongly that they can direct without having to hold the territory themselves.
