Comment by geofft

> Imagine belonging to an expert, seasoned team that masters a given technique. Literally the worldwide top 1% for that technique works under your roof.

That would worry me immensely. What sorts of things are we not realizing because we're not exposed to other ways of thinking? What sort of talent are we not training up because we don't know how to recognize it? And what do we do when some of the people under our roof retire?

Have you ever hired someone who worked at Google? They're quite probably in the worldwide top 1% for software engineering talent, and still they come out of Google expecting everything to work in a Google way. And conversely there are folks at my company - skilled software engineers - who I wish would go work at Google for at least a few months, because they've been here for probably ten years and while they're very good they've never seen how other people do things. They're skilled, but they simply have not had opportunities to learn deeply from the outside world, and in a field moving as fast as software, no single organization can keep up.

This is why open source exists in the first place. Whether or not you think there's an ethical imperative to share software, the whole idea of open source is that different companies can share source code to produce better results than in-house development and buying licenses to closed-source software would achieve. At some point, if you're on an expert team that works under one roof, you're going to stop being the experts in the thing, because the other 99% of people interested in the subject can all learn from each other, can try the things you dismissed privately long ago, can experiment at scales you simply couldn't imagine.