Why Industry Leaders Favor Closed Source While Challengers Embrace Open Source

Industry Rule: Leaders Close, Followers Open

“在任何行业的竞争中，老大总是喜欢闭源的，老二总是喜欢开源的。”

【守成者（老大）】 资源绝对优势 → 闭源封锁 → 构建技术壁垒，独享垄断溢价
【追赶者（老二）】 资源处于劣势 → 开源开放 → 凝聚全球开发者，“抱团攻坚”破局

Historical OS battles

PC era – Windows vs Linux : Windows built a closed‑source commercial empire that captured the high‑margin desktop market. Linux adopted an open‑source model, attracted contributions from millions of developers, failed to overturn the desktop dominance, but subsequently captured servers, supercomputing clusters, and cloud infrastructure, becoming the foundational layer of the Internet.

Mobile era – iOS vs Android : Apple’s iOS remained a tightly integrated, closed ecosystem, securing the majority of smartphone profits. Google released Android as open source, enlisted hardware partners such as Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, and together achieved >80% global market share.

Current AI landscape

Overseas incumbents (OpenAI, Anthropic) : Possess early‑stage, top‑tier compute clusters and high‑quality data. They lock their models behind closed source and monetize via API subscription services, creating a technical moat.

Chinese large models (DeepSeek, Zhipu GLM, Kimi, etc.) : Confronted with limited compute and ecosystem resources, they publish model weights and source code. Open weights attract global developers for fine‑tuning, satisfy enterprise private‑deployment requirements, and accelerate convergence with foreign leaders through mass co‑creation.

Why open source can still be profitable

Linux and Android demonstrate that open‑source kernels can underpin massive commercial ecosystems. The article lists three concrete monetization pathways:

Hosted cloud services : Provide ready‑to‑use high‑performance AI inference and training APIs; charge for compute and infrastructure usage.

Commercial technical support & private deployment : Offer architecture consulting, security audits, and managed model operations for government and enterprise customers.

Ecosystem traffic & revenue sharing : Generate income from developer platforms, app stores, and downstream applications that rely on the open model.