$10 Trillion in Market Cap. $12.5 Million for Open Source. I Pulled Their Receipts.
Seven companies worth $10 trillion wrote a $12.5M check for open source. I pulled every receipt. The last one involves five million stolen books.
Twelve point five million dollars. Ten trillion in combined market cap.
That is less than two million each. Google generates that much revenue before most engineers finish their morning coffee. Anthropic spent more on political candidates last month.
This week, seven tech companies, including Google, AWS, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, announced a joint $12.5 million pledge to the Linux Foundation’s OpenSSF and Alpha-Omega programs for open source security.
Headlines celebrated. Press releases circulated. The word “commitment” appeared in every announcement.
I spent 20 years building production systems on open-source infrastructure. I coordinated thousands of engineers across platforms that depend entirely on the code these companies extract from every day.
I appreciate the gesture. Genuinely.
But I also know what each of these companies has done to open source when the cameras were off. So let me pull their receipts, one company at a time. Because the history here reads less like philanthropy and more like a crime scene.
