Comment by StillBored

Well I don't disagree with that either. Only that I must point out that libre washing a company with an open source product here/there doesn't really count. Sure android is open, but google isn't using it to make money directly, instead it feeds into the closed source ad/marketplace offerings.

If they opened that code, or apple opened up the entire iOS stack its quite likely they would have competitors that as you point out lowered the value of their primary offerings.

A google with a half dozen competent ad/search companies would look very different than the one that can afford to give away a large part of their product portfolio.

So, there is value in operating a "service" buisness, but there is even more value in operating a service business that has high barriers to entry. One way to erect those barriers is with hundreds of millions of dollars in engineering time spent on "source code" be that the code actually doing the searches/etc or the code being used to manage the clusters its running on.