> Heroku, Shopify, Basecamp, Github, 37 Signals, and others have spent in terms of money and developer-hours

Companies are legal fictions that we allow to exist. The _people_ are the ones who did the development, management, and all the other things that had to be done.

The companies may have _paid their salaries to do so_ but there are plenty of open source communities that exist without the direct funding of work.

This splitting of hairs between the legal entities and the work of their paid teams/employees isn’t adding strength to your argument. Companies are run by people and those people get to make decisions on the allocation of resources. If they decided to put substantial resources into OSS, the company does get to claim credit there.

> there are plenty of open source communities that exist without the direct funding of work.

Great! Maybe the Ruby community can strive for this in the future but it does not reflect the OPs point that these companies and their outsized contributions via time and money are still core to the existing community we have today.