Which method can generate more development, sharing or making profits?

People are more and more enthusiastic about computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, and many relevant topics; there are many people investing themselves into these fields and hoping they can make a difference in this field or earn lots of money from it, and even some children are starting learning how to programme as they and more importantly their parents believe the next generation belongs to the computer. There are many influential people working on, discussing and thinking about the development in the field of AI (as well as other relevant fields). There are two paths for people to develop their codes, open source or making profits.

Both paths have their pros and cons. If developers make their codes open source, they can receive more help from their community, so they can finish their courses faster. Moreover, if a program receives more help from more people, it can be more reliable. However, such work is largely depend of people’s enthusiasm. Of course, some people help the projects in an open source community just for having more experience in order to make them jobs in the industry. Because their projects are open sourced, developers do not earn any money from making them, then there is an issue of continuity. On the other hand, if people can make profits from their projects, then the motivation will no longer be an issue, and the continuity can be guaranteed. In addition, people also need to improve the reliability and many other aspects of their projects in order to make profits. However, because the project is for profits, it cannot be open source, so it limited the involvement of the entire community into this project, then the development may be lack of some intelligent minds.

Overall, it cannot judge which path will push the development faster than the other. The existence of the two paths in the real world probably indicates both paths are meaningful and reasonable for the development in these fields.