How does an OpenSource project work?

Question

Project management

Good afternoon.
Who has OpenSource experience, tell me in general terms how it works?
Here, let's suppose there are 3 parties:
1. The author of the project with the source code
2. Volunteer volunteers with pure intentions
3. The insidious / dishonest competitor with a similar project
After the source code is uploaded to OpenSource, what are the subsequent events:
1. ... for the author?
2. ... for Volunteers?
3. ... for Competitors?
Thanks in advance for your reply.

Answer 1

The goals of publishing a project in source codes can be different:
1. Personal beliefs
2. Legal necessity (for example, the project is based on the GPL code)
3. Ease of distribution (no need to maintain ports for different OS / distributions on your own)
4. Developing a portfolio / reputation
5 .Business model (the product is supplied for free, but there is a donation or support for money - it is beneficial that the product be used as widely as possible). This is especially true if the software developer is registered as a charitable foundation, as in the US, for example, companies can donate part of their taxes to such funds, and the fund has the ability to pay salaries to developers. Foundations, for example, have Linux, Apache, NetBSD. nginx makes money from commercial support.
6. Oddly enough, if the code is open - there is no need to take care that competitors do not steal it, and authorship is easier to prove.
7. If the product is initially developed not for sale, but for internal use - the ability to attract external resources to development and spend less of your own.
8. Brand advertising - very often small companies make a free product, incl. open source to promote paid products.
...
According to the author - CSF, portfolio, reputation, karma, donation, earnings on support, additional resources in the development of the program, external code audit, getting rid of code leak protection problems.
Volunteers, competitors - depending on the license. If this is a free license - then portfolio development, skills development, in the case of a fund - there may be a possibility of monetary reward, the ability to modify the code for oneself, the ability to create generated products. At the same time, in the case of the GPL, these products must also be open source. In the case of commercial open source applications, there is little reason for volunteers or competitors to pursue them.

Answer 2

For the author - to decide on the license (open-source is not a type of license), for the rest - to read it and follow it.