>>768686free software has a certain market potential: it commoditizes things that are helpful to
your business. you take one piece of the whole business, monopolize it, but push the rest to become a perfectly competitive market where nobody makes any money but - because it's a perfectly competitive market - consumers can buy more stuff, and with it,
your stuff. you stop anyone freezing you out because there's no money to be made in an adjacent industry that'll give you a foothold.
e.g. if you're microsoft, you want PCs to be a commodity because the more PC sales, the more sales of DOS/Windows take place, so you help a bunch of competitors to IBM enter the market with (if you like) "free hardware". IBM get muscled out, and the thousand squabbling PC makers make pennies while you make thousands. none of them can make demands of you, because they're afraid of you freezing them out rather than vice-versa.
the other way round: DEC funded the X-window system as open source because other unix distributors were trying to establish proprietary graphics standards, which would freeze DEC out. DEC weren't confident they could establish their own graphics standard as the monopoly, so they funded an open source effort because it "neutralized" the problem, returning the realm of commercial competition to hardware where they had an advantage.
(Steam throws money at SteamOS for the same reason: They know they'd die if Microsoft threw their weight around, so they want to have enough of a back-up to make it unwise for Microsoft to do so.)
why does google fund so many FOSS projects? well:
>I once had a strategy professor define the Google business model somewhat like that, where “Google tries to make every other business around it free or irrelevant”…A desert of profitability shifts consumers to you, and keeps competitors away.>>768690a naive view.