As a business, you want to look for "sustainable competitive advantage." A way to differentiate themselves from competition and make a profit. Having closed-s

As a business, you want to look for "sustainable competitive advantage." A way to differentiate themselves from competition and make a profit. Having closed-source code is a sustainable competitive advantage for many companies selling heavily software-dependent products like games, apps, websites, etc. "Advantage" because your competitors don't have it, "sustainable" because, with adequate investment in new features, you can keep your platform ahead of copycats. There are a variety of strategies to make money with open source, but as a business, your first priority should be figuring out how you'll make enough money to adequately pay your owners, employees and vendors. The answer to that question is sometimes "open source," but not always. Strategic reasons can sometimes justify open source products. For example, consider infrastructure components that are an incidental byproduct of your operations, not a core piece of your product. Twitter Bootstrap immediately comes to mind. Twitter releasing Bootstrap as open source doesn't help its competitors in the same way that open sourcing the code to its main website would, and allows the community to provide some amount of testing and improvement which may help them in the future. But there is no one-size-fits-all answer; whether to open-source your code, and what to open-source, depends on your specific situation.