The experience won while writing that code could be a lot more valuable than the code itself. If ever a car company was interested in building on top of what co

The experience won while writing that code could be a lot more valuable than the code itself. If ever a car company was interested in building on top of what comma.ai has done so far, they would hire (or acqui-hire, that's the VC bet) the heads and have them rewrite the code together with more formal engineers. But when nobody is buying comma.ai, nothing of that will happen. The (little, given the domain) money invested will only have been sponsorship of a romanticized take on hacker culture. Which may actually have been a contributing factor in the investment decision here, this a frugal garage operation, not a fast-burning startup with fancy offices. Open sourcing some code can create visibility, without it we would not be talking about this today. From the investment perspective, opening this code is clearly a hail-mary-pass. There are situations when those are the best course of action and I think this is one of them.