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What companies like Nintendo should do is to sign up for OSS support services like https://www.tidelift.com/, and whether they have or haven’t we don’t know.

Sending out free consoles would just be a marketing gimmick, and could just as well backfire as “you can’t eat a console, do Nintendo really think consoles are the way to support open source maintainers?” etc

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exactly, corporate altruism has so many ways of backfiring, your example is one great example. I can just imagine the sort of mental gymnastics Twitterers will find to be outraged at any x billion dollar company efforts to do low-tier outreach with freebies.

Just simply supporting OSS directly, as in real money, is more than enough to quiet these "they should give x freebie".

That is all the mob should be calling for as a standard practice. Not sending some random developer who happened to get popular on Twitter a nintendo.

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