There are "business benefit" use-cases that don't fall into either of those categories. Note that the article doesn't claim that this is an exhaustive list, nor

There are "business benefit" use-cases that don't fall into either of those categories. Note that the article doesn't claim that this is an exhaustive list, nor that there aren't positive cases. I just want to mention and discuss some of them. I keep them general, because those are my interpretations. But you'll probably recognize similar things in many other projects. One compelling example, comes from a maintainer and author of several popular repositories that are quite powerful and would be hairy and time consuming to re-implement. Typical high-impact, foundational library code. Some of his arguments for making them open source seems to be primarily two fold, one is not as directly business related: He just wants to provide things for others to use and sees benefit in that, so it's both altruistic and fun, but also due to getting more use, his libraries are more exposed and hardened. The other one is simply not wanting to repeat the same work over and over when switching projects or employees. This is a really important one IMO. Foundational libraries are ridiculously expensive to re-implement in every project for every employee. It's just inefficient. But by open sourcing them everyone who uses them gets to benefit from everyone else. Everyone gets to be more efficient and potentially have higher quality code that is maintained over a much longer time.