Good point. I agree that decentralization is preferred. But I suspect that these massive tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Google and the like) have enough money laying around that they think to give an open source project a decent amount of funding may cost them relatively little, but could give them a better reputation around the wide pool of talented developers whom they hope to employ.

Obviously, this will still generate profit for them, as better developers will produce better end products, but I don’t think it’s as malicious as it could be.

And obviously we wouldn’t want large monopolies to control any critical infrastructure. Oracle is bad enough.