I'm curious how you would feel about a scrappy bootstrapped startup building their business around your FOSS and then, sometime much later, becoming a large company whose founders become billionaires. (I have a couple of examples in mind where this has happened.)
> What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?
For folks who do not work 100% in OSS, there can be many points:
- The whole Github-as-resume thing makes it important to have public contributions (most people's day job lives in private repos). To some extent, much of the industry needs OSS in lieu of effective employee screening processes.
- It's a convenient way for big companies to exchange IP without formal bilateral agreements. Everyone else just benefits for free.
- Your line of work is X, but you built a crude project for Y. You open source it because you don't actually care about area Y at all but hope your work could be useful for someone else.
- You write something for yourself and publish in the hopes that someone else will help you improve it for free. You're looking for free work and/or critique of your work. You don't actually care if someone else makes a billion dollars on it because you weren't interested in starting a business around it. Plus, you gain reputational points from having built it (consider Linus Torvalds's ability to get work as a programmer as a result of having started Linux, for example).
> What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down?
For folks who do not work 100% in OSS, there can be many points:
- The whole Github-as-resume thing makes it important to have public contributions (most people's day job lives in private repos). To some extent, much of the industry needs OSS in lieu of effective employee screening processes.
- It's a convenient way for big companies to exchange IP without formal bilateral agreements. Everyone else just benefits for free.
- Your line of work is X, but you built a crude project for Y. You open source it because you don't actually care about area Y at all but hope your work could be useful for someone else.
- You write something for yourself and publish in the hopes that someone else will help you improve it for free. You're looking for free work and/or critique of your work. You don't actually care if someone else makes a billion dollars on it because you weren't interested in starting a business around it. Plus, you gain reputational points from having built it (consider Linus Torvalds's ability to get work as a programmer as a result of having started Linux, for example).