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They are not doing it for free

* They build it for internal use, primarily

* They use it for advertisment (hey ING bank would never be mentioned here otherwise)

* They can eventually use it for recruiting (send high quality PRs, they might like you)

* If they are lucky they get cheap bug fixes (not free, as review and community work costs time)




They also get to demonstrate their way of doing things in public, which in a field as active and mercurial as frontend web development has value in influencing where changes go. If they have a particular solution to a problem that's not well-solved elsewhere, they can influence the world to follow their approach to solving it (or at least not pull the rug out from under them) instead of going a totally different way and turning their code into technical debt.




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