Meta’s open source presence is for tooling, not their revenue-generating product. They benefit from their tools and frameworks being open source because they r

Meta’s open source presence is for tooling, not their revenue-generating product. They benefit from their tools and frameworks being open source because they receive free labor from outside contributors, and they give away very little in dollar value by keeping those tools open source. There is no way to sell React and make even a noticeable fraction of the profit that Facebook does. Their value is orders of magnitude apart. For-profit companies struggle to actually make a real profit off of those types of tools and frameworks because there’s so much benefit to having them be open source. That’s not where the money is. React isn’t a money-generating product and likely wouldn’t be a strong business on its own. Jira, Salesforce, and Notion would all sacrifice a dramatic amount of revenue if their core product was open source. Why would anyone pay for those products if you could self-host them for free? Open source may be good for the world but we are talking about for-profit businesses. Corporate greed is literally how they run. The only time a business makes something open source is when it directly benefits them. You can say whatever you want about good karma but that is not how businesses make decisions about how they generate revenue. The goodness does not usually come back in kind in the world of business. Again, the example is Meta. React having outside contributors benefits Meta more than keeping the library closed source. Other companies who use React don’t generally compete with Meta’s bread and butter revenue product, and even if they do, it’s not giving them any specific business advantage over Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp.