Because there is a massive difference between sharing revenues / idea and making a business profitable off a clone.
You could copy a lot of ideas out there right now, but that is the smallest part (in my mind) in making a business out of it. The coding and 'making' of the product, is actually the smallest part.
Getting any consistent revenue, marketing, growing your user base, reducing churn - those are all much harder than actually building or copying something.
There are _many_ ideas on github right now with real working code & permissible licenses you could just grab and try to make a business with. So why aren't there profitable, sustainable businesses popping up all over because of this? (Hint: coding is not the hard part, idea is not the hard part)
There are companies who build commercial products from that open source projects. The most obvious example is format converters. There are tens of products build around free ImageMagick and ffmpeg.
You could copy a lot of ideas out there right now, but that is the smallest part (in my mind) in making a business out of it. The coding and 'making' of the product, is actually the smallest part.
Getting any consistent revenue, marketing, growing your user base, reducing churn - those are all much harder than actually building or copying something.
There are _many_ ideas on github right now with real working code & permissible licenses you could just grab and try to make a business with. So why aren't there profitable, sustainable businesses popping up all over because of this? (Hint: coding is not the hard part, idea is not the hard part)