Software seems to be very different from most other industries in this regard. Companies which focus on enterprise have generally found it easier to make money from consulting, SaaS or providing other complementary services rather than selling software outright, because it’s generally cheaper to take an off the shelf open-source product and make money by customizing according to your customers needs.
If we are talking about tools (programming languages, web frameworks databases) there is little incentive for companies not share their improvements or full projects with everyone if they are not planning to make money from selling it directly. E.g. it’s not like open-sourcing React had any-negative business impact for Facebook, the opposite, people worked for free to improve their internal tools and it made it easier for them to attract new talent.
Google created Android and Chromium because it allowed them to increase their ad-revenue and they made them open-source because it was much cheaper to build top of projects which which already worked. I.e. they gained more by open source software than they lost by giving away their improvements for free, which is fine because they never intend to make money from them directly and having access to the OSS bits didn’t make it that much easier for other companies to compete with Google in the core market.
I don’t see how would this play out with hardware. If you designed a CPU core which is much better than your competitors what would you gain by giving it away? If making chips is not part of your core business and you just want a product which fits your needs better (e.g. equivalent situation of a software company which allows it’s employs to submit patches to Linux/Posgres/etc.) how would you even do that? You don’t have the expertise or equipment needed to produce chips and if you did it meant that you made a significant investment to be in that position and therefore have no incentive to share your improvements with anyone).
If we are talking about tools (programming languages, web frameworks databases) there is little incentive for companies not share their improvements or full projects with everyone if they are not planning to make money from selling it directly. E.g. it’s not like open-sourcing React had any-negative business impact for Facebook, the opposite, people worked for free to improve their internal tools and it made it easier for them to attract new talent.
Google created Android and Chromium because it allowed them to increase their ad-revenue and they made them open-source because it was much cheaper to build top of projects which which already worked. I.e. they gained more by open source software than they lost by giving away their improvements for free, which is fine because they never intend to make money from them directly and having access to the OSS bits didn’t make it that much easier for other companies to compete with Google in the core market.
I don’t see how would this play out with hardware. If you designed a CPU core which is much better than your competitors what would you gain by giving it away? If making chips is not part of your core business and you just want a product which fits your needs better (e.g. equivalent situation of a software company which allows it’s employs to submit patches to Linux/Posgres/etc.) how would you even do that? You don’t have the expertise or equipment needed to produce chips and if you did it meant that you made a significant investment to be in that position and therefore have no incentive to share your improvements with anyone).