I've been thinking about this to, but one large example of "open source data" is IEX[0], they provide realtime order book info for thousands of stock/etf/etn ti

I've been thinking about this to, but one large example of "open source data" is IEX[0], they provide realtime order book info for thousands of stock/etf/etn tickers. They must see some financial benefit in doing so. The big reason why those companies pulled back is because they realized that they don't think they will have a monopoly in the long run on being able to monetize the data better than others, every other excuse just seems to be icing on the cake because if they were confident, they open up the data they collect more. [0] https://iextrading.com/developer/ https://iextrading.com/developer/