Probably the same motivation Yahoo had to release Hadoop, FB to release Hive, Netflix to release so much of their libs and so on and so forth:
- if nothing else, it does no harm (no 'secret sauce' competitors could benefit from)
- it buys karma (think recruiting goodwill)
If the project catches on though then there are many advantages:
- it can spark a self-sustained ecosystem that can further drive the product, at much lower cost for original creator (think Hadoop leading to Cloudera, Hortonworks etc). Product improves, bugs are fixed, toolset matures
- newhires come with know-how to use your internal tools, lower ramp up, better productivity. Anecdotal, but when I was at Microsoft no newhire knew how to use the internal Cosmos stuff, and even among old timers more folk were familiar with Hadoop...
"No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
-- Socrates
[1] https://cses.fi/book/index.html