How different is that from tech giants using their monopoly profits to develop software that they give away for free? You say AT&T gave away some software to universities. Similarly Google gives away Go (among many other projects) as FOSS for anyone to use. If Google didn't have to worry about money, they might not develop these things to give away for free.

Google is "giving away" Go in order to get en ecosystem, which means they can offload training to a community and maybe even get code from external.

They give away Chrome for spreading it and giving them control over web standards.

AT&T gives UNIX away as they have no revenue stream on top of it and it being research.

Google isn't giving out their research work.

AT&T were forced to because of regulations.

> If Google didn't have to worry about money, they might not develop these things to give away for free.

I get the impression Google has no intent to give things away for free anymore lol

But regardless of your impression, they give loads of stuff away.

Because they can use the gifts to facilitate lock-in or because they want to share development with other companies or individuals. They give nothing away without it bringing something of equal or more value to them, or they're tossing it over the wall for dead. Any misconception you have that it's because they're super swell people should be slapped right outta you if it's there.

> Any misconception you have that it's because they're super swell people should be slapped right outta you if it's there.

The idea that businesses have to be super swell people is what should be removed. Businesses doing things for money is good. Just as employees don't work for them because they're super swell people. You just shouldn't be thinking this way.

It would be fine if they didn't.

Mapreduce, Go, Kubernetes, Istio, Tensorflow,...

I'm not a Googler but there's no denying that, despite all their faults, Google has contributed a lot.

TIL that Istio was a Google product!

Wrong. Meta is the same, no ML. We wouldn't even have modern ML without Google publishing that paper.

Regulation creates a problem and then creates a solution, skimming off the top every time.

I think the point of releasing Go (they were already using it internally before) was just to get free labor to help expand and improve it. They simply had nothing to gain from keeping it private.