tobek

The downside to this is that it's hard. This kind of service requires a sprawling infrastructure with many dozens of servers and tens of thousands of dollars in costs per month. And the amount of programming work to take that code-base and make it just work, plug-and-play, on someone else's machine for individual use, or in a larger set-up for shared use, is pretty serious. Not to mention that the many individual services powering such a service are often reused and tangled up in other (critical) services run by a company, and it's not always possible to separate out the intellectual property.

This is only a sampling of the issues - open-sourcing huge projects is actually much trickier than you might think!