You mean Cloud Companies are using the wealth created from hosting other's OSS to finance their own OSS efforts.
By no means are their OSS investments altruistic, Cloud companies by far benefit the most from OSS and no OSS developers aren't winning. Being able to hire OSS developers using funds generated from hosting their OSS efforts is some weird definition of winning, which they're using towards strengthening the software ecosystem around their cloud infrastructure - increasing its value.
The power and value of OSS is swinging sharply away from Indie OSS developers towards the major tech cloud monopolies - where they can now afford to outspend, out compete, out reach and out last any competing Indie OSS efforts.
If you look at linux, the biggest part of the source code has been created by professional developers employed by large companies (ibm, google, intel, oracle).
Without the backing and investments of commercial companies, Linux would not be the success it currently is. So in the end everyone benefits in some way, although maybe not financially.
Same goes for a lot of other succesfull opensource projects: without commercial backing it would not be as succesfull.
> By no means are their OSS investments altruistic
why does anything have to be altruistic? Why can't a company invest in OSS selfishly? The results are the same - more OSS available for anybody else to use.
> OSS developers aren't winning.
what's "winning" here? Is winning gaining financial profit from OSS? Is winning gaining user/market share? Is winning just merely being employed to do what you want to (i.e., employed to contribute to OSS)? And why is any one of those definitions more worthy than any other?
It doesn't, parent is suggesting everyone benefits when cloud providers use their accumulated wealth to hire people to work on their OSS investments as some kind of justification for the consolidation of wealth from OSS happening around cloud monopolies.
It doesn't benefit everyone, it benefits anyone using their proprietary and OSS products and cloud services. It definitely doesn't benefit existing OSS projects who are seeing their innovations replicated by full-time resources or OSS developers working on competing projects.
By no means are their OSS investments altruistic, Cloud companies by far benefit the most from OSS and no OSS developers aren't winning. Being able to hire OSS developers using funds generated from hosting their OSS efforts is some weird definition of winning, which they're using towards strengthening the software ecosystem around their cloud infrastructure - increasing its value.
The power and value of OSS is swinging sharply away from Indie OSS developers towards the major tech cloud monopolies - where they can now afford to outspend, out compete, out reach and out last any competing Indie OSS efforts.