As a software engineer, I don't think capitalism is the only factor preventing big companies like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit from releasing their back end cod

As a software engineer, I don't think capitalism is the only factor preventing big companies like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit from releasing their back end code... You'll find that their back end code is a real mess with millions of lines scattered all over the place, with various parts tightly coupled to specific hardware and software vendors; I can almost guarantee that if Facebook made their back end code fully open source, you'd probably need a team of 100 full time engineers working round the clock for 1 year or 2 to launch a Facebook clone... These platforms are way over-engineered; the technology essentially cannot exist without the people. Facebook as a platform is not merely code; it's an insanely complex amalgamation of both people and code. It would be useless to make their back end code open source as essentially nobody else would be able to run it. That's why Twitter software engineers were making fun of people wanting to release the Twitter algorithm... They were well aware of what a complex mess it was and how unrealistic that was. People have the right intuition though; it doesn't need to be so complex. It is complex by design.