I'm not suggesting it's magic. Indeed, what I specifically said was that we should work to build strong cultural expectations. Which are very much necessary in all the cases you name.
That's not because they just had some good feelings. It's because people expect them to be at least slightly non-awful. We can accomplish something similar here. If programmers start insisting that companies take open-source funding seriously, it will happen. Not quickly and not easily. But if people start taking action (e.g., turning down jobs when companies are parasites on the open-source ecosystem), things will change.
Yes and no. A lot of that spending is done with a monetary incentive in mind. Companies aren’t completely devoid of understanding that there is a certain breaking point where being shitty can have financial consequences. They aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, not predominantly anyways. They can use charitable contributions to project a public persona (earned or not) of being good, for the purposes of increasing/maintaining business. They can do it as a smokescreen/cover for other scandals for the same reason.
Is that a good thing? Yes.
Is it enough? Not even close.
The culture needs to change sure, but the change of culture that needs to happen seems effectively impossible unless companies are dragged into it kicking and screaming through organized labor efforts or government oversight/regulation. Those are both of course highly polarized political issues and that aspect of culture sure isn’t getting better either.
I think the quicker, sadder, and easier change is that a lot of Open Source projects just aren’t going to get started like they used to, and are going to have increasingly restricted licenses with stratified feature sets. We’re definitely seeing more of the “Taking my ball and going home” approach by small developers with tiny open source packages these days and it’s sad but also hard to blame them for. Even worse there are an increasing number of groups who attempt to buy projects for sometimes stupid money for the explicit purpose of using them as a Trojan horse to ship malware. They’re preying on the same people who have become incredibly cynical about the whole thing and that’s dangerous for everybody.
What do you think underlies most of the changes via "organized labor action or government oversight/regulation"? People understanding that things should be different, which is a cultural change.
The history of the minimum wage isn't that some bureaucrat mandated it and then everybody said, "Gosh, that's a good idea, let's keep it." There was a long period of advocacy for it, a period of persuading people that it was the right thing to do. That was the ground in which all the work for the change grew.
Today, software developers are the key labor force for this change, and we aren't organized. So in practice, the first work we have to do is to persuade the bulk of programmers that it's part of their professional duty to make sure their employers support the open-source projects that their businesses depend on.
Companies will do it if we insist. In the grand scheme of things, it isn't even much money, not compared to what they're paying programmers in salary, benefits, and cushy amenities.
As an example, note that the Fortune 500 spend $20bn annually on corporate social responsibility: https://econreview.berkeley.edu/stocks-sustainability-how-th...
That's not because they just had some good feelings. It's because people expect them to be at least slightly non-awful. We can accomplish something similar here. If programmers start insisting that companies take open-source funding seriously, it will happen. Not quickly and not easily. But if people start taking action (e.g., turning down jobs when companies are parasites on the open-source ecosystem), things will change.