[freedomben]

This would be interesting to hear about from an insider. I suspect you're right. Having worked at a company that open sources most of their code, I've seen first hand how much better the code quality is when you know it's going out to the world. When you know it's gonna be hidden and only a handful of people will ever see it, you're much less hesitant to push up hacks :-) We open sourced something that wasn't originally going to be open, and we spent weeks going through cleaning up and refactoring things to avoid public embarrassment.

[kanwisher]

What’s the business value in spending weeks of developer time refactoring things that are going open source. For some industries it’s required like blockchain. For average shop seems like more expense with no profit

[freedomben]

In our case, the business value was that it was a contractual clause with a customer. The idea was that keeping a million dollar customer and spending weeks refactoring was cheaper than losing the customer and getting sued for breach of contract. So we're probably in a similar boat as block chain like you mention.

However, I think you underestimate the value of open source. Besides being the right thing to do (respects freedom, allows developers who built it to use their code later in line with license agreement, allows others to learn by contributing or at least reading, plus many other benefits) it can be a powerful recruiting tool. There's real business value in getting good hires.