Opensourcing a component means it no longer provides any competitive. It just helps companies increase their open source credentials or decreases their cost of development over the next few years!
As per decreasing the cost of development over the next few years, it is actually quite the opposite. In the near term, the cost of development increases as the system not-only needs to work in your organization, but also work externally - with external technologies.
You are right that reducing the cost of development is a goal, but there are many things that need to be done initially to facilitate that and make the project self-sustaining.