There's a very real business reason to make certain goods cheaper, even at your own expense. "Commoditize your complements" is the short catchphrase for some of

There's a very real business reason to make certain goods cheaper, even at your own expense. "Commoditize your complements" is the short catchphrase for some of this. The short explanation is that when something is cheap, demand for complimentary goods goes up. For example, when the software for managing cloud deployments gets lower (in a total cost of ownership sense, not just sticker price), then demand for cloud computing goes up. Google has both Kubernetes as an open-source project and Google Cloud Compute as a revenue-producing product. Really good blog post that explains this in further detail: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ There's another reason to do open-source, and that's to get your future hires pre-trained on some of your internal tools and frameworks. If Go or Angular were internal-only things, Google wouldn't be as able to hire engineers with experience in Go or Angular.