I mean I get the service part, but why can’t somebody not just copy your code and do it better? Or just take your code make it closed source? Thanks
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A couple of other ways that have not yet been mentioned:
1) Selling the hardware. There are many electronics devices (not just smart devices, but anything that runs on electricity and has a controller chip) that runs on embedded Linux as firmware. In this case, the firmware is open source and anyone can ask for the source code. But the company makes money by selling the hardware. Yes, you can modify the code and modify the firmware on the device, but the company has already made money, and modifying the device voids the warranty, so they are protected from anything that you do.
2) Selling the consumer- AKA the Google business model. The Android OS is open source. Google does not makes money on it. But, by having Android being the default OS for non-Apple phone and tablet users (being open source really helped Android OS get there) Googles gets to bring all of those users into the Google ecosystem, where they get used to using Google search, Google map, Google doc, Google mail, etc. Then, Google can turn around and sell those users to advertisers.
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