A codebase is an assert (or a liability), one that you spend time and money creating. If your business model/operations are such that anybody with the code coul

A codebase is an assert (or a liability), one that you spend time and money creating. If your business model/operations are such that anybody with the code could clone it quickly, it's a bad idea to give it away. The obvious one I can think of is where you sell (commodity) hardware + value-add software for a premium. Mobile apps is maybe another example which already suffers badly from cloning (without available source code), because the over-saturation makes success more or less luck. From a business perspective, open-sourcing some code still make sense in many situations though. You may want to grow a community around it (Docker/Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Salt/etc), or gain market share by making it easy to install/try out (see previous, or PostgreSQL vs Oracle/MSSQL/IBM DB2), or recruit. In general, "business" is always going to underestimate the value of this and stray away, because it's taking a leap of faith (read: risk). It gets interesting when pluses and minuses overlap. For example Arduino, would they have gotten as popular without being open source? Probably not. Are knock-offs cannibalizing their sales? A bit. Did that cause much loss? I don't know, I assume ARM boards and ESP8266 had more impact. So even though they're commodity hardware + software, the community part probably offsets the easy-to-clone pitfall.