Google has contributed more to open source than Valve while being a public company. It's not just Valve who sponsor open source work.

Valve employs like <400 people

They seem to be skimping out on their contributions to FFmpeg.

Google has contributed many patches to ffmpeg. Valve has contributed 0 as far as I am aware.

They aren't. Sometimes headlines are misleading.

But what percentage of what Google has produced has been Free Software vs what percentage of what Valve has produced? Google may have produced more Free Software, but Google also produces way more things.

I don't think this very practical or relevant here, but I expect Google to have a higher percentage. Valve employees are focused on Valve's proprietary software: Steam, SteamVR, their games, etc. Valve more often pays contractorsto work on open source software than work on it themselves.

My comment was more to prove that it possible to do open source while having share holders. My claim that Google does more is auxiliary to it.

I'd like to see that comparison tracking the number of devs and how much open source software each company uses.

That's very true, and I didn't realize it until you just said it.

If you think publicly-held companies are bad, wait until you see what private equity gets up to.

Okay, but have you heard about the monarchy?