this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Tell me how the math works out on this one.
Because last I checked, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Google still are the biggest companies and their wealth rests primarily on closed source software.
I would think for the "largest" transfer of wealth, we would be able to pinpoint some poor exploited geeks coding software juxtaposed against some rich fat cats making money off of it.
But Linus Torvalds doesn't seem poor and IBM/Red Hat, while rich, is much smaller than Microsoft.
I agree with this take, but Google does stand pretty tall on Open Source. Android is technically the most widely used Linux variant in use.
Sure, they all use open source to varying degrees.
But most of Android is actually contributed by engineers who are being paid by Google.
We could argue that $300K in San Francisco is still exploitation, but there are worse forms of exploitation in any case.
And I wouldn't be surprised if ChromeOS is second.
Apple I think relies heavily on the BSD project (I think they might be even using the same kernel?) and Google on Linux. There's also probably a lot of open-source software they use behind the scenes or which aren't as big.
They use their own kernel but a lot of the userland is FreeBSD-based (and some senior FreeBSD contributers are also Apple employees)
In Linus' defense, I would probably pay the person that wrote and maintains the software that literally runs the world pretty well too. Can't afford not to.