> No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money This m

> No one is still able to crack the make money while open sourcing something unless the tool is completely tangential to the way the company makes money This might not be so much about making money as not losing some. Say you develop a product in Ruby and no fast XML parser exist but you need one. You could start development of such a library, and once it reached some maturity give it to the community, which in return will make all sorts of improvements (from code review to bug fixes to refactorings to translations, etc). Net result: you don't waste so much time on a critical dependency and can concentrate on your product, and so everyone moves forward.