Most often, opensource software are not opensourced with a commercial intent. They are created for ideological reasons and / or to highlight their professional

Most often, opensource software are not opensourced with a commercial intent. They are created for ideological reasons and / or to highlight their professional skillset. Some of these opensource projects become popular, and soon the creator(s) become deluged with feature requests and / or support requests for the opensource software. Ofcourse, at some point it becomes economically unviable for a developer to provide quality service for free. So some ask for sponsorship and donations. Some of them create a non-profit foundation to accept donations. Others choose to commercialise their product and offer paid support services or find other revenue streams. E.g. (1) Mozilla Foundation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation - dictates the development and commercialisation goals of the popular Firefox browser and Thunderbird Email client. Their main revenue stream is tying up various online services with their software (e.g. search engines). (2) SQLite - https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html - They sell support at various price tiers and additional features to their software. They also ask companies invested in their software to support them by funding them - https://sqlite.org/consortium.html https://sqlite.org/consortium.html . (3) Wordpress - https://wordpress.com/ https://wordpress.com/ - also sell their opensource product as a Software-as-a-service . Some for-profit companies do opensource their project too. Their intention often includes PR, to increase the popularity / user-base of their product, get free work from other developers etc. Sometimes they use and enhance existing opensource projects and thus are obliged to share their work as a opensource too. E.g. (1) Apple - https://opensource.apple.com/ https://opensource.apple.com/ - They built many commercial products from permissive opensource software, and release some of their work back as opensource to counter the negative PR that they only leech of free work by others but don't contribute anything back. (2) Google - https://www.chromium.org/ https://www.chromium.org/ - They used existing open source web engines to create their browser platform. Thus they were partly obliged to share their code. It also helped to increase their market share as they were initially not a major player. (3) MySQL - Originally was dual-licensed as free open-source and paid closed-source (everyone contributing to the opensource project had to also consent to their code being used in the closed-source version without any remuneration). This model provided a lot of PR and free labour to the founding company. (Is now owned by Oracle.)