"What is the incentive to build open source software?" How do you answer this?

I love open source, but I can't seem to answer this.

Anything else stifles innovation and collaboration across nations, corporations and teams.

FlOSS is the best way to innovate & advance technologies.

What's better?

A 20 person team VS everyone person across the globe who wants to contribute

The ladder in my opinion. There's obstacles but they're well worth solving, just look at Linux :)

If you start a pet project that is promising, you might be not able to make it profitable alone.

Two options:

1) create a company, hire people to work on it, deal with investors, and SELL (which is likely the least represented skill among devs).

2) make it Open Source: peers can review your code for free, contribute for free, improve the software until it reaches a certain critical mass for free...

When I say "for free": you actually "pay" by giving away the code, but you get the idea ;-)

Don't take it wrong: BOTH options are valid. They are just not the same challenges, and both can fail.

Myself, I have a (still young) Open Source project called restgoose (https://github.com/xurei/restgoose) and I'm the lead developer/founder of a fresh Startup.

What would we do without open source software? Any company big enough to control the market could go ahead and do whatever the fuck they want.

It would be incredibly easy for spy agencies to demand backdoors and get them distributed because nobody can check the code anyways.

Next to that, building a product on only proprietary "standards" makes that you can't innovate on top of those standards and I think the innovation in the software worlds would stop or go very slow.

The real question is: Why not opensource it?

The only upside of closed source is that it allows shadiness.

Want to hide something? Closed source.
Want backdoors? Closed source.
Want to sell shit-tier code? Closed source.
Want to restrict users/features? Closed source.

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Oh, I can think of another: China/etc. can't steal your code and sell it themselves. (Since they're the worst offender by far.)

@Root Could we get a "favourite comment" feature? 😐

Open source is like opening a pizza box, seeing a great pizza in it, and eating the pizza!

Closed source is eating mystery pizza, and what's worse, you have to eat the box with it since its superglued shut. (It is labeled with a nice pizza photograph tho!)