4.4.2. Zope : Give Away a Recipe, Open a Restaurant
Digital Creations, a web-design house had developed for building their sites a complex and powerful system (which is now known as Zope).
A venture capitalist they brought recommended they release it as open-source so it will be a critical advertising for Digital Creations real-asset: its people. I.e: people which will evaluate Zope would find it more efficient to hire the experts than to develop in-house Zope expertise.
It also made more people contribute to the Zope codebase.
As a result, Zope is now a successful, powerful and flourishing application server, with many third-party applications.