If there was no money in doing it, it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. Whether this money is from investors or from monetizing services doesn’t matter in the short term, only that somebody is willing to pay.
An alluring oversimplification, but your cynical framework can’t account for the communities of people who put in time and effort into FOSS projects. The quality and popularity of open source alternatives has eroded the moats of proprietary services, making it impossible for them to monopolize and profit from this public technology. So if it happened the way it did, it wasn’t for the reasons stated.
I don’t think it is that hard to answer.
If there was no money in doing it, it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. Whether this money is from investors or from monetizing services doesn’t matter in the short term, only that somebody is willing to pay.
An alluring oversimplification, but your cynical framework can’t account for the communities of people who put in time and effort into FOSS projects. The quality and popularity of open source alternatives has eroded the moats of proprietary services, making it impossible for them to monopolize and profit from this public technology. So if it happened the way it did, it wasn’t for the reasons stated.