That is not new. They've been doing that since the 2000s.

The way I understand it is that there are at least two reasons, maybe more:

• Google (like all tech companies) uses a lot of open source software internally, so benefits from it being improved
• Google wants to train possible future employees

Not everything Google or other big tech companies do is necessarily bad; we should be taking advantage of the good parts of what they do.

Inside Google, there's two wolves...

Which shouldn't be surprising really; it's contains a huge number of people, including people who post here in their spare time. The problem is that power tends to self-reinforce, and so in the absence of outside intervention, the proprietary enshittification wolf is bound to win.

Google's summer of code started 21 years ago and has been a positive thing from every angle.

Remember that back in 2005 Google was still largely running under its founding principles of "Do no evil" and I honestly believe it was a truly altruistic move. Certainly, a great amount of coders got access to skills and support they would never have otherwise, and a huge amount of projects benefited from it. Google weren't the only supporters of it, I know Suse contributed and likely others.

So why do they still do it now that Google is all grown up and abandoned those founding principles?

I suspect it's due to some or all of these reasons;

• Why not? It's good PR and cheap advertising.
• They get to spot good developers early on and enhance their hiring quality.
• Those developers bring energy, skills and access to projects. Those are the active employees that every employer wants.
• The projects are used by Google so improving them is net benefit to the company.
• Cancelling it now would lead to bad PR and bad feeling. Even Google doesn't want to needlessly waste a good thing. And if they did stop it, a competitor might swoop in and not only take the benefits from it whilst looking like the white knight.

Open source benefits big tech too. Eg see all the huge corpos who donate to the Linux Foundation, because Linux is necessary to their work. Google gets good PR from summer of code, and students will be recommending summer of code to each other. It gives Google a good amount of cultural capital among engineers. It's not like Google has no cash to spare for a couple projects to make them look good and secure their role as one of the most dominant tech companies across the field.

It allows them to tell the antitrust regulators they are not a monopoly. "See? We're fostering competition!"

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish

Encroachment and control.. These Corps does nothing without a purpose..

There are many, varied motivations for contributing to open source projects, and most of them aren’t a sense of altruism.

It’s great PR to market open source in utopian terms, but the reality is far more complicated.

The Apache web server wasn’t created out of the goodness of people’s hearts but out of mid-90s internet startups’ need for a reliable, scalable platform on which to profitably run services.

Capitalist enclosure always relies on the theft of public goods to create "private property".

Oh yes, Google and also MS are the biggest distributers and developers of OpenSource, it's true, but also for own advantages with inbuild tracking and profiling APIs, best example Chromium or Android as is, full FOSS, but a lot of work for companies and devs which want to use it, to kick out all the Google tracking crap it has by default.

To be clear, OpenSource is great for develope and distribute software, but it's a big mistake to think that FOSS is synonym of privacy and security, this depends only on the author and what he pretend with it, very debatable in case of big corps like Google, MS, Amazon and Facebook. That they sponser other OpenSource projects means nothing, when they can use it by themselfs (apart of the sign in with Google option which some show) or maybe obtain the pemission to include their APIs, apart of tax advantages.

For sure are tecnically high quality products, but there are alternatives with equal quality by start-ups and some devs, without all the spyware from big brothers, they always preferable. FOSS also has a lot of different licenses, which is mandatory to read to know what is allowed to do with it and what not, not always so open. The only real free license is this one.

In software it's always mandatory to read TOS and PP, if it has a good support and community, if it has a good maintance with regular updates, if it don't track you or sell your data to third party as business model. Irrelevant if it is FOSS or not.

Unfortunately the ruling that corporations are people (and thus have the right to free speech via giving donating to political campaigns), was a real downgrade for people.

Maybe its a nti-competitive business strategy Check this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish