I personally always try to engineer away from cloud services. They cost you ridiculous amounts of money and all you need is documentation afterwards. Then it can be easier and faster than AWS or GC

Can someone rip your work? Yes. Is that really an issue? No. Just stealing the code changes nothing, the person needs to invest money to continue build it themselves. The original developers will always be at an advantage since they know the code base. The fork (the new version) also won’t benefit from any of the changes by the original developers, or they need to carefully copy them over. If the hostile fork is also open source then it doesn’t matter since you can just take their changes if they are good. Making it mutual.

You can also use licenses that forbid the closing of the source. Doesn’t stop real thief’s, but it gives you a tool to stop it and also anyone who ignores a license like that is also generally not very competent.

I work in open source one of my products is. The benefit of open source is apparent when we talk about core technology and standardization. It’s not very helpful when it comes to specific implementations or customization.

Open Source requires sponsors, sponsors need to build on something to create capital to pay the developers behind the open source. I.e. Blender is open source, because people use it to make 3d models that they sell or get paid to build. So companies that use these models to make products like games and movies, pay Blender so that they can continue making it better and give them support. Also individuals and companies can add stuff to it. But really that’s neglect able. Open source is a promise.

Yeah, can’t wait for all those unicorns to fold. It will be a great time for all companies that are doing 10-20% growth, as they will be getting all the money when investors start getting careful again