I think that's rather optimistic. If the company is getting all that value without having to contribute, you have to ask whether there really is any incentive to contribute and what additional value that specific business might get from doing so beyond a fuzzy sense of community spirit.

It's also the case that a lot of the most-used open source projects need contributors with pretty specific skills - compiler specialists, kernel and driver developers - that many of the users of those projects will not themselves possess and be able to contribute in kind - which would in many ways be the easiest contribution to get past the accountants.

In the rest of commerce, these problems are resolved by the price mechanism. I think we just have to accept that in the absence of that mechanism, the human tendency to take rather than give will prevail.

Also - many companies aren't in a position to contribute.

What does a hairdresser using an open source calendaring system contribute?

What does a small retail company who uses open source office systems contribute?

The fact that tech companies do is good - they are in a position to do so, but most companies don't have the capacity to do more than report any bugs they find nicely, and I'm sure that happens informally.

Actually that the dark side of open source - fewer companies driver the implementations and most of them are in too few sectors. Moreover without paying customers developers aren't interested in adding features outside the scope of the few actually paying their bills - but a few who don't need to code to live.

There's a reason why software became uglier and clunkier to use.

Two thirds contribute back.

Nearly half open source their own code.

That is a lot.

It's easy to forget that an important way that companies can contribute to free software is by reporting bugs and following them up. People often think of bug reporters as takers, but in fact they are giving back in their own way, especially if they are willing to front the testing of fixes.

The other shocking gap is in decent doc. I wish more users that can't program would step up and contribute in this way.

Reporting bugs and testing fixes is one of the ways I contribute to open source however it can be a thankless task. Some maintainers can be less than friendly and there are a couple of libraries I'd love to ditch because the maintaner is an arse but can't because there's no decent alternative and I haven't found the time to write my own version.

75 per cent reported cost saving as the primary driver for open-source adoption

Unfortunately, in such reports we are unlikely going to find out why and how those savings come about. The truth is that simply put contributors to open source projects are not being compensated. There are exceptions, of course, where some companies even put some contributors on their payroll, but I'd say majority of developers don't get paid.

Given that it is not legal to work without compensation for a for-profit company - the worker needs to at least be paid a minimum wage, the Open Source software is a "great" way for companies to side step employment laws.

Open source software is still a "rich kids" club, where people from impoverished backgrounds cannot participate in, as they simply cannot afford to work for free. This creates a social divide in the IT world, which we can still see today.

Open source software is still a "rich kids" club, where people from impoverished backgrounds cannot participate in, as they simply cannot afford to work for free. This creates a social divide in the IT world, which we can still see today.

But it also creates a world where those same kids *can* engage with technology for free.

"The truth is that simply put contributors to open source projects are not being compensated."

Do you really think that all those developers working for Intel, Google Red Hat/IBM etc whose contributions make up the bulk of Linux aren't being paid? Truth? Really?

And that word "compensation"? That's the sort of PR-speak that tells us that the modest sums being given to CEOs and the like is compensation for their distasteful labours. Most people are paid to do a job.

If you mean "compensated" in the wider sense then those who have some particular need that isn't being met by existing software, or at least by anything they can afford, get together to produce their own solution, then they are being compensated. They're being compensated by getting what they wanted in the first place.

"Do you really think that all those developers working for Intel, Google Red Hat/IBM etc whose contributions make up the bulk of Linux aren't being paid? Truth? Really?"

Whilst they contribute much more these days, the vast majority of Linux was still written by people like you and I. Unpaid and purely for fun. Actually, many of these companies were actively hostile to Linux and in some ways I feel we deserve compensation for the lost man-hours faffing around their crap.

I've just posted extracts from a report of 2017. That puts corporate contributions at at least 85%. As you say, it's growing but a bit of Googling shows that earlier (2008, I think) it was already at 70%.

It's worth adding these two paragraphs from the 2017 report from linuxfoundation.org on Linux Kernel development, the latest I could find. They cover the period of kernel development cycles 4.8 to 4.13

The top 10 contributors, including the groups “unknown” and “none,” make up just over 54 percent of the total contributions to the kernel; that is up slightly from the previous version of this report. It is worth noting that, even if one assumes that all of the “unknown” contributors are working on their own time, well over 85 percent of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work.

Interestingly, the volume of contributions from unpaid developers has been in slow decline for many years. It was 14.6 percent in the 2012 version of this report, but is 8.2 percent this time around. There are many possible reasons for this decline, but, arguably, the most plausible of those is quite simple: kernel developers are in short supply, so anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline tends not to have trouble finding job offers. Indeed, the bigger problem can be fending those offers off. As a result, volunteer developers tend not to stay that way for long.

The top contributor was Intel with 13.1% of changes. The next was the entire body of contributors with no affiliation at 8.2%. Red Hat was 3rd with 7.2% IBM was 6th with 4.1% - if those were taken together to reflect the subsequent merger they'd be the 2nd largest. Looking down the list there are, as expected, other S/W businesses - including Oracle with 1.7% but a lot are actually hardware manufacturers.

The foundation also produced a report on 2020 contributors to FOSS in general. The most (just) common motivation given was "I use this piece of FOSS and needed the specific features/fixes I added".

So one of the biggest and commercially used OSS projects is still using free labour. The argument that some developers are being paid doesn't invalidate the fact that OSS facilitates exploitation.

When it comes to corporate contribution, it does not mention how much the workers were paid or in what capacity they worked - for example, many employment contracts actually take ownership of the code that employee creates in his or hers spare time or do not pay for overtime. So those corporate developers that contributed actually may not have been compensated.

Another question is the proportionality of compensation. Linux kernel made and makes corporations billions and billions every year, but this money doesn't "trickle down" to developers.

Anyway - that's the deflection of the main topic - exploitativeness and divisiveness of open source.