There was the fixed cost of developing it, and then the potential lost revenue of not selling it, similar to an opportunity cost.
If the presumption is that the software would be useful ("developed for a reason") economics suggests there is some price people would be willing to pay for it, and you forfeit that when you make it OSS. That absolutely costs something.
Sure you may not want to be in the business of commercial software (support, maintenance, ultimately just responsibility) which is a completely sane thing to avoid. However when you are bleeding money at the rate of a small country's GDP per year, avoiding opportunities to generate profit based on intangibles like community engagement can come off as ill-advised. In fact, if your company is declared bloated, it stands to reason that you should have the capacity to take on the additional overhead of selling the software. It is not that contributing to OSS is wrong, or that your points are wrong, just that there is a time and situation for this kind of strategy.
Contrast with Amazon, whose entire development of AWS was for the reasons you point out. Instead of open-sourcing it, to the extent that would be possible, they made it into a product and almost in a single move turned consistent overall loss into a massively profitable company.
So this is not at all to argue against the merits of having healthy OSS contribution at a company, but more to say that a company can't contribute to OSS if they are bankrupt - so avoiding the latter should be prioritized over the former.
If the presumption is that the software would be useful ("developed for a reason") economics suggests there is some price people would be willing to pay for it, and you forfeit that when you make it OSS. That absolutely costs something.
Sure you may not want to be in the business of commercial software (support, maintenance, ultimately just responsibility) which is a completely sane thing to avoid. However when you are bleeding money at the rate of a small country's GDP per year, avoiding opportunities to generate profit based on intangibles like community engagement can come off as ill-advised. In fact, if your company is declared bloated, it stands to reason that you should have the capacity to take on the additional overhead of selling the software. It is not that contributing to OSS is wrong, or that your points are wrong, just that there is a time and situation for this kind of strategy.
Contrast with Amazon, whose entire development of AWS was for the reasons you point out. Instead of open-sourcing it, to the extent that would be possible, they made it into a product and almost in a single move turned consistent overall loss into a massively profitable company.
So this is not at all to argue against the merits of having healthy OSS contribution at a company, but more to say that a company can't contribute to OSS if they are bankrupt - so avoiding the latter should be prioritized over the former.