[thinkingemote]

Where is the value of a business? Is it the idea (or ideas written as code) or the execution (or service)?

What do people pay for? The code, or the things the code does?

What is valuable to customers? Is trust more important than the unknown? Is expertise valued?

What other things apart from code makes up a business? For example customer service, marketing, etc.

[chdaniel]

Yepyep - but my question is: what's the spiel? What do these companies get "in exchange for" becoming open-source? What's the incentive?

[mattbrewsbytes]

A flip on the incentive might be that their core product uses open-source software somewhere in it and the style of open-source license may compel them legally to release any modifications, additions, etc. I don't know which licenses that may or may not apply to and IANAL.

Also for reference, RedHat's entire business model was like this, mostly charging for enterprise support. I use past tense because I have no idea what they do today. Way back in the day that mean when you submitted a support ticket, you might get a developer that worked on the product to help you if it was beyond their initial support triage level.

[hgs3]

> What's the incentive?

More sales and trust. Vendors who open source are offering their customers the right to repair and self-host their products should they go belly up. That itself is a selling point.

[meiraleal]

They can't compete with the closed-source ones. Open source is a very efficient user acquisition strategy. Not as much to turn users into paying customers tho. But it is a way to go from 0 to 1 in a market that otherwise would be very difficult to call attention.

[ErikBjare]

They get customers who are developers, who won't settle for closed source, or who want to self-host.

You could read up on the "open core" approach. Gitlab is a good example.