Your story about a park going from "public" to "private", with the manager tricking the volunteers into making something that is no longer public and pocketing

Your story about a park going from "public" to "private", with the manager tricking the volunteers into making something that is no longer public and pocketing the money, is a false analogy for multiple reasons. 1. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the company, the park was private -- fenced off -- from the start; there was no "bait and switch". This is the part which is worth 1.8 billion dollars: the brand name, network, software and system. 2. What do you mean by "open"? If you're talking about the content licenses, then the park is still open and public to this day. This is valuable too, of course, but no one will buy CC-licensed content for 1.8 billion dollars. It's just in the commons. Basically, while both the website and the content are valuable, the 1.8 billion dollars you're complaining about wasn't used to buy the content. Anyone can get that for free. It was used to buy the website, which has always been private and proprietary. Your story would make more sense if StackExchange was a non-profit started by a group of volunteers which somehow got turned into a for-profit and sold to the benefit of a single person, or if they somehow re-licensed everyone's content into proprietary. But neither happened. And that's why it's a false analogy.