Every developer alive has shipped code that was built on top of someone else's unpaid labor.

Open source is the foundation of the modern software industry. It powers startups worth billions. It runs inside products used by hundreds of millions of people. It's maintained, in many cases, by a handful of volunteers who do it because they care.

And most of the companies benefiting from it have never contributed back a single line.

I'm not here to shame anyone. I'm here to say: if your company has never seriously discussed contributing to the open source projects it depends on — financially or otherwise — that's worth a conversation.