Google loves open source likely for another reason than you do.

Google loves open source when they can capitalize on it.

That is, when a big community works on code that Google can use for free to build their monopolistic infrastructure. They love a global community which works for them for free. They might even foster this community as far as it serves their purpose or for image reasons.

However, if they’d truly love open-source, they could open the source code to their core services. But they’d never ever do that. For this reason they also ban the AGPL license internally (https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy). The AGPL license would force Google to open their code which relies on AGPL licensed projects. Google hates that.

Google does clearly not stand for the ethical values people usually have in mind when talking about open source. For example when something is competing with them, they’ll hate it. Like ad-blockers or browsers which don’t block ad-blockers like Google chrome does. The core business of Google is about surveillance and advertising. To maximize the profitability of this, then need to violate freedoms of their users (like the freedom to use their service while blocking ads). This is in direct conflict with the ethical values often implied by free and open-source software.

So if somebody tells you “Google loves open-source and contributes a lot”, think about what it really means.

gitlab.com is a for profit service/company. They have an open-source community edition of Gitlab which you can run on your own server. Codeberg is a non-profit association running the open-source software “forgejo” for you. At Codeberg you can become a member and then you can vote for important decisions and make proposals. People also care about ethics there. Nobody cares about profit. Codeberg runs on donations from members. I think some people feel more respected at Codeberg because the governing body of Codeberg is a subset of its users. If Gitlab cares about you, then probably because a bad user experience would be bad for business.

Yeah sorry, confused things. It’s comes closer to a Mastodon thing. The point is that a big corporation like Facebook does not need to use AGPL code as long as they can just re-implement it. Compared to the total codebase used at Facebook, re-implementing something like lemmy or mastodon does not sound like a big deal. (That’s not an argument against using the AGPL)

Unfortunately it’s still possible to rewrite a VC-backed clone and start making incompatible changes. Think about Facebook’s “threads.net”. They sure did not take Lemmy source code.

Often, the contributor license agreement says that you - the contributor - transfer the copyright of your contribution to the project/company.

This is used to get the community contributing to the project while making sure that the project can be turned into a proprietary project at anytime.

The copyright holder can decide about the license. As long as only one entity holds the copyright, this entity is free to change the license. This even works if the project is licensed under a copyleft license like the GNU Public License (GPL). Such projects might look like “open-source”. Fine, the source is open at the moment. But it might not be open anymore tomorrow.