In reply to Rick.

There is so, so, so much more to "re-creating" some one else's business than simply re-creating their code base, as you have implied by saying "Ok, take or recreate their codebase and take their thunder".

Success in business has very, very, very little to do with the code behind a product. Does it help? Absolutely. Do customers care what the code looks like or how it's written? Not even remotely (with a few rare exceptions).

Just because someone can take the code that another successful business has publicly released does not mean the "taker" can turn that into a successful business. In fact, knowing what kind of numbers a successful business has actually reveals exactly how incredibly difficult it is to build a successful business.

There are so many examples of failed products where the founders took the idea, design, and possibly even code from someone else, yet they still failed.

Overall, I have been pretty successful with some of the products I have created over the last 5 years. I would welcome with open arms anyone that wants to take on the challenge of building a business on top of one of my products by taking the code base. Seriously, all of my products are 100% open on Github and you can fork any one of them and start your own business on top of them. Just because you do that, however, do not magically expect to be pulling in $500-$800k per year from those products. The same goes for every product / business listed (and not listed).

The beauty of revealing open metrics is that it gives true perspectives on these businesses. It is so easy to look at a business and think "they must be killing it", or "how could they possibly be surviving?". Unless numbers are revealed, it's all speculation, which is perfectly fine, but having the facts leads to some really great changes.

Public metrics take away "I wonder how well they do" questions and replaces them with "what have they done that I have not?" type questions. It leads to inspiration and ambition.