Google sponsors open source software through the Google Summer of Code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
Some projects that benefit include:
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Open Street Map
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Organic Maps
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VLC
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LibreOffice
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Gimp
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Debian
Why do they do that? Google is one of the world’s largest corporations.
Isn’t this… very suspicious… ? Is their goal simply to fuck with Adobe and Microsoft executives?
Because they’re using them in their products, or the non-public infrastructure that keeps the product running, or their teams are using them internally.
Check the licenses of the projects you listed. If they allow free commercial use, you can assume those products are key to the software somewhere.
Don’t underestimate how much of big tech is made of OSS - companies will always take free stuff. They pay them because if the projects die or are compromised, so are their paid products.