Comment by seec

There is no way to properly make money from fully open protocols. If you do the hard work of research and development, your competitors can just take the work and sell their implementation minus the R&D costs, undercutting you. It's not sustainable.

It's basically what Apple learned during the Macintosh clones era. Churning out countless units of the same stuff isn't that complicated once you have figured out what needs to be copied. Getting the worth-copying state is the hard and expensive part; nobody is going to do it for free.

This can readily be seen in the "free" open-source software world. The vast majority of it is just lower-quality copies of existing software.