The corp participates in some open source program (that they don't own). Then hire the best people that contribute to the project. I have seen this work several times over and it has always resulted in high quality developers.
Yes. My employer employs something like 70,000 programmers.
Your way gets you 10 programmers that do a really good job. Now find the other 69,990 programmers. (I like to think I get a lot of work done, but I can't get 7,000 people's work done.)
(If it was my company, would I have a bunch of unrelated development departments with no common standards on 5 continents? No. But it's not my company, so I don't get to decide, I can only observe.)
If you want to hire 70,000 below average developers in no time flat you can. Realistically you are not hiring that many at once but over a long period of growth.
All I am saying is that using open source as a way to find talented individuals who love what they do and are really good is one solid way I have found to find new talent. If that can only get me X number of devs a year than that is X number I don't have to hunt through resumes for.
You mean in the sense that both approaches work horribly?