I don’t get why big companys are afraid of open source software.
I know that monetizing open source is hard but in exchange they would have 8 billion programmers ready, for free!
Even if they do like redhat , as controversial as it is right now, they would be better off than just closing the source.
I would be willing to pay to have the license to modify my own software even if I couldn’t redistribute it afterwards.
Acquiring knowledge about the product takes time. Upstream has a better position just by being the one to create it and having all the knowledge about the product immediately, not after some time. Someone who decides to rebuild that would either have to fully maintain their own fork (and open source their work as well if the upstream has copyleft license), or upstream their changes, since reapplying bug fixes and new features requested by clients on top of the original codebase will take more and more time with each upstream change. Upstream can also restrict the use of their trademark, which would add a burden of marketing to downstreams as well.