I don’t get why big companys are afraid of open source software.
I know that monetizing open source is hard but in exchange they would have 8 billion programmers ready, for free!
Even if they do like redhat , as controversial as it is right now, they would be better off than just closing the source.
I would be willing to pay to have the license to modify my own software even if I couldn’t redistribute it afterwards.
Because of anti-customer features. Hard to implement those in a FOSS project, without a fork undermining you.
Not only anti-customer features. Any kind of product monetarisation becomes much harder in a FOSS project.
Say, you built this cool piece of software/hardware/product.
You can either keep it closed source and sell it. Anyone who wants to clone it, needs to put in a similar amount of R&D to what you did. If you have patents, you can even stop them from copying your stuff all together.
Or you can open source it. That means, you need to spend more money to get your product open source ready. The design files need to be good enough that someone other than you can use them. You need a good documentation, so that others can actually replicate your work. All that is not cheap. And then someone else will come along and copy your stuff. Since they have no R&D attached to it, they can easily sell the product cheaper than you did (or even give it away for free, see e.g. CentOS).
If they are super anal about that, they even add your Github page as the place to put feature requests/bug reports. Happened e.g. to a game console cartreader project where I contributed.
Do the math: Which option gives you better return on investment?