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Yup. It's pretty common for open source to be used, abused, modified in house and not shared. Just look at Sergey Aleynikov and Goldman Sachs. [0] Further I've seen a shop deploy hundreds of thousands of CentOS nodes to avoid RHEL license fees. Doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of shops not funding FOSS they exploit like OpenSSH, etc. Most of them are stingy, demanding, greedy bastards.

[0] http://blog.garrytan.com/goldman-sachs-sent-a-brilliant-comp...



>Most of them are stingy, demanding, greedy bastards.

I'd go so far as to say "nearly all of them."


There's a few counterexamples, which is a good thing:

iXSystems does a lot of cool community work via FreeNAS, PC-BSD and FreeBSD.

Github (Ruby), thoughtbot (Ruby), Google (Go, Python), Dropbox (Python), AT&T (C++, Ruby), Zurb (Ruby, Foundation), Twitter (Ruby, Scala), ...

missing a bunch and some platforms too.


Also part of the reason I grabbed the eject handles on enterprise devops consulting. Although I did manage to fight and win open sourcing changes to net-ldap so that it worked with A-D.


Further I've seen a shop deploy hundreds of thousands of CentOS nodes to avoid RHEL license fees

Such decisions often happen at the engineer level, and it isn't for money management reasons, but rather "avoid purchasing and requisition BS, followed by licensing compliant BS" reasons.




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