Reality is it is sort of mixed. For the OSS company actually building the product, you end up playing whack-a-mole in that anyone can spin up a competitor over the weekend. Look at what happened with Docker. They completely changed the landscape of running code locally and in production and was run out of town. Everyone and their dog took the code and re-packaged it and competed with Docker. Then compare that with VMware, they completely changed the landscape of running code locally and in production but they were able to protect that value and thrive as a company. There is definitely a lesson in there.
Sure, maybe this is a feature but if you're about to launch an open source sales model company you probably need to think really hard about that idea.
The result is that the industry got better container run times because they had to compete with each other. Competition is a good thing - it gives us better products and services at lower prices.
And Docker still had the ecosystem, which they could have dug a deeper moat around. But they didn't, and they failed.
And not for nothing, VMWare has a significantly deeper technological moat than Docker. Containers are not hard to implement, virtualization is.
Their virtualization tools are niche, being squeezed by whatever the cloud provider offers for "free" on one side, and KVM (and platform-native hypervisors) on the other. You rarely hear them mentioned.
Sure, maybe this is a feature but if you're about to launch an open source sales model company you probably need to think really hard about that idea.