zlacker

Maybe. I’m operating a non profit engineering project. I have no expectation that the non profit will make me money, but we do plan eventually to spin off the project in to a for-profit partner that takes the open source and adds value-add fleet management systems (it’s a farming robot) and service contracts. We are modeling this after the successful implementation of this method by the Ardupilot drone software founders.

So while the non profit is a specific legal entity that has a certain clear function, one may still want to use this public benefit open source project for for-profit means.

However this doesn’t really apply to OpenAI, because their system is not open source and also because strangely, their non profit owns the for-profit. Non-profit founders could theoretically be fine desiring profit, but the way OpenAI has done it seems particularly strange.