"but if I had to assign a percentage of revenue that is attributable to feross' library, I think I would assign it exactly 0.00000% "

How do you know? Did you followed internal developement of the switch?

"Since feross would materially gain from being gifted something from Nintendo, should feross give partial ownership of the Switch to the authors of the open source tools he used to build his library?"

Why not? Whats wrong with inviting them over for a gaming round, or sending parts of the money? Depends on the amount.

I know because the author's project, safe-buffer, is obviously open source, and you can look at it on his github. It is 65 lines long, and mostly boilerplate. And what isn't boilerplate isn't even particularly complicated code (which is a good thing) - it just adds a few common sense safety checks to the Buffer class.

> Why not?

Nothing's wrong with that. But if the author doesn't do it, I won't call him an ungrateful asshole and berate him on twitter.

"I know because the author's project, safe-buffer, is obviously open source, and you can look at it on his github. It is 65 lines long, and mostly boilerplate"

Ok, well, I didn't. And probably neither did most people on twitter. That being said, you probably know too, that even some lines can be very valuable, if they prevent crashing bugs. In either way, it is a value.

It just would be nice, if companies could find more ways, of giving back to OSS, if they use it.

The internet sentiment is, 'they' are exploiting the OS community - thats why the harsh reactions, even though maybe not justified in this case.

Yes, it is a value, but it isn't really anything that couldn't be rewritten from scratch in about 30 minutes by a typescript developer.

And it's possible that they aren't even directly using his code, and don't even really know about it beyond an automated system publishing the licenses. Due to the way licensing works, Nintendo could be using OSS library A that they shower their largess upon with free switches, but library A uses library B, which uses library C, which uses safe-buffer. Safe-buffer would still have to have their license published in that manner, but it isn't really clear that nintendo is exploiting that party. Hell, it could even be the case that the author's code is never actually executed on the switch, if for example it was bundled in but is part of a feature that is never called, because Nintendo wanted to use other parts of the same library that happened to include safe-buffer.

By the way, I just checked Nintendo's open source switch library, and there are at least 36,000 copyright notices present in the archive. That's a lot of free switches!

Companies do not run on morals. If you want people to pay you then sell it as a product. Likely you will find out that Nintendo would rather reimplement it themselves.