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> They don't spend more money for fun. They do it because they've had experiences of many on-a-weekend projects become critical-path nightmares.

yet strangely these sorts of straw-man organizations adamantly refuse to open source any such projects even if they have nothing to do with their business because of the perceived loss of intellectual property value..

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Because strangely, it's really expensive to audit your code, it's really expensive to get sued if you flub it, it's expensive to replace all the bits you can't opensource and it buys you approximately nothing in return except a comment on Hacker News accusing you of some ulterior motive.

if you're a business with capital-M-Money, and you put "hello world" up on github, if someone wipes out their machine running it they're going to sue you. Doesn't matter what license you put on it, you're going to need the lawyers and they cost more money than you would have theoretically gained by putting your crappy "hello world" with the accidental "rm -fr" command in it up on github.

Has this ever happened? There are plenty of companies that are not software companies releasing open source software.

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