You've answered your own question.

They're allowing free access to this particular bit of code.

The reasons are varied, but could include

• Based on an already open source code

• Used in a paid product or service. The extra support is offered for free

• It is intended for academic use

• Its just a small project that they don't want any money for

• It is a requirement for a third party site or service that your code is made freely available

• They just want to make it freely available

• It is a legal grey area, and charging for it would definitely be illegal

Also lets not forget other developers can add to it and work out possible problems, pretty cooperative envoirement at times.

There's a significant incentive for programmers early in their career, which is as a resume builder. College students are often advised to put school or independent projects on github to use during interviews.

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Some companies will OS a subset of the features, which allows users to build around their code only later to discover they really like it and are willing to pay for the additional features.

RedHat a major linux support company OS all their code in the beginning, they made money off of support and service rather than the actual code.

This is a good answer, and I'd also add that many individuals/companies thrive only because they exist in an ecosystem where everyone contributes to the advancement of software. Amazon makes a lot of money selling cloud computing resources, for example, so it benefits them to make contributions to advance and grow software development in general which then drives more demand for cloud compute.

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While /u/Aussie_Mo_Bro's answer is good, I think one piece that needs more explanation is that most programmers make money by selling their time, not by selling their code.

Very few programmers write code to sell directly to customers.

Sure, it happens sometimes. There are some indie apps and games on the app store. And some programmers sell their code. But overall that's not a great way to make money.

Instead, most software that needs to be written - including websites and apps - is a means to an end. Chipotle has an app so that people will buy burritos. Avis has an app so that you can rent a car. Chipotle and Avis each pay lots of programmers to build those apps for them. That's generally how most developers make money.

To repeat: Programmers don't make money by writing code and selling the code. They make money by people paying them to write custom code for them.

So because of that, when a programmer releases something as open-source, they didn't lose anything. The code is already written, it's not going to make them money if they keep it secret.

This makes sense thanks for this!

I've not worked anywhere that doesn't keep the code you write as their property.

Not saying it doesn't happen, and I haven't really been contracting

Sure, I'm not saying you open source code produced for someone else.

Companies sometimes open-souece code that they need but isn't key to their profit. For example, Facebook open sourced React because they found it to be a useful way to build web frontend but it has nothing to do with their core business. So Facebook gets more out of people freely collaborating on React than they would out of keeping it secret.