But Red Hat did customer support on what they sold, built up the server suite etc. The major thing is that they big guys have to put what they create and modify under the GNU license back into the community.

Apple puts back into the community the fixes to BSD unix, but not the stuff they themselves create. I think that is pretty normal.

If you are a progressive and you figure out how to grow safe, organic, totally chemicals free, high yielding vegetables in two month, climate controlled cycles, don't open source that knowledge under the delusion that it will be used to feed the world. It won't. Large food companies will take the technology, build their proprietary systems based on it, patent them so that no one else can use them for free, then make hundreds of billions while people in some places in the world still starve. As an inventor, you are better off patenting the technology yourself and controlling it's use so that your wishes to feed the world have a better chance of being realized.

Free contributions make up a minuscule contribution to the code base. And while it's still vital and an important aspect of open source, the most valuable aspect is the ability for the open transparent review of the code base so bugs can be caught, and people can freely tinker with it, and of course for free distribution to those who want it.

It was always the plan to make it so that code is free (as in freedom) and free (as in beer) was a side effect.

It started off as a small project and now runs the world. It's an incredible achievement for coders.

The guy who invented Linux released the original code and notes for free. The entities that have made money off the original code built proprietary code based upon it and prevented use by anyone else. It has been a one sided game. The guy that originated Linux should have kept control of it's distribution and use, including being used to make proprietary code.

While there is still a lot of proprietary stuff (such as device drivers) if you have an Android phone, for example, you should be able to contact someone to get the source code that runs it. That's how people make "custom firmware" for phones, they literally get the code the company has to release, remove their bloatware, and release it (though they all share similar code bases anyway).

The point remains that most open source code is made by employees of these big corporations. It's not written by a large freely working labor pool.

Especially if your code represents a commercial threat to the large company. Open source as it is now practiced is an assymetrical affair, big enterprises control it and quash or buyout competitors. Using my food example, I have no assurance that such won't happen if a person open sourced an invention for low cost, widely distributed food, big companies would monopolize application and distribution and food prices would stay above affordable for many people and communities in the world.

Have a look at this:

https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/

To add my 2 cents to your excellent commentary...

Secret source is the aberration, the anti-science, for almost all programming -- it's like the medieval cabals and guilds. Imagine Newton trying to keep his math as secret as MS does.

Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow. It makes no sense for, e.g., Volkswagen of America to develop and maintain their own complete operating system when they can simply develop parts that are specific to their needs and submit them to Linux as patches. There should be little that they need to keep secret from competitors. The less they have to do in-house, the less it costs to maintain.

I have Debian Linux on all my desktops, laptops and servers and it has been that way for many years. Cost.... zero.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux

"The first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to bear the name originally came onto the market as "Red Hat Linux Advanced Server". In 2003 Red Hat rebranded Red Hat Linux Advanced Server to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS", and added two more variants, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS.

Red Hat uses strict trademark rules to restrict free re-distribution of their officially supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,[8] but still freely provides its source code. Third-party derivatives can be built and redistributed by stripping away non-free components like Red Hat's trademarks. Examples include community-supported distributions like CentOS and Scientific Linux, and commercial forks like Oracle Linux, which does not offer 100% binary compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, because Oracle uses a non-standard process[citation needed] to clear the Red Hat brand"

They also have a free distribution called Fedora.

"
"Fedora serves as upstream for future versions of RHEL. RHEL trees are forked off the Fedora repository, and released after a substantial stabilization and quality assurance effort.[15] For example, RHEL 6 was forked from Fedora at the end of 2009 (approximately at the time of the Fedora 12 release) and released more or less together with Fedora 14. By the time RHEL 6 was released, many features from Fedora 13 and 14 had already been backported into it. The Fedora Project lists the following lineages for older Red Hat Enterprise releases:[15]"

"Both Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are open source. Fedora is a free distribution and community project and upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is a general purpose system that gives Red Hat and the rest of its contributor community the chance to innovate rapidly with new technologies. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a commercial enterprise operating system and has its own set of test phases including alpha and beta releases which are separate and distinct from Fedora development."

That is, employees working for companies, that in turn use open source code.

In that vein that GPL was very very effective.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3253948/open-source-tools/who-really-contributes-to-open-source.html

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-github-2017-be98ab854e87

IBM continues to try to reinvent itself (again and again).

I expect they want to compete with AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Just in time for Halloween too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd