If you're wondering "why don't they just close-source the whole thing, and then they don't have to worry about competitors?", there's two reasons. One, open sou

If you're wondering "why don't they just close-source the whole thing, and then they don't have to worry about competitors?", there's two reasons. One, open source is a good marketing tool to acquire trend-following customers, gain industry rep, and better hires. Two, if an open-source clone emerges, it could become a threat to their product, so they need to keep people using some version of their own product. This is what it means when a business says open source is a "strategic advantage". All these "formally-open-source companies" are learning the same lessons we learned in the early 2000s: competing on software alone only works if you're licensing a proprietary product, or you're giving it away as a lock-in tool for a platform you control. The alternative is to compete on service and support, which works until you compete against a platform. A big player with a platform will just take ten million dollars and a year and a half and write their own version of it, and their customers will use it because it integrates with the platform's products better.