I can assure you that nobody at Cloudflare ever thought that open sourcing workerd would be a way to get "free labor from the commons". On the contrary, we are wary of external contributions. The Workers Runtime is a complicated codebase, and we invest a lot of time into getting new team members up to speed on how to write code correctly. We cannot make such an investment in external contributors who are only there to land one PR. Usually, a one-time contributor trying to do something complicated will waste more of the team's time than they save.

But in practice, we almost never receive major contributions from outside the team. Which is fine. We're happy just to have our team working in the open.

The reasons we open sourced it are:

1. Support a realistic local dev environment (without binary blobs).

2. Provide an off-ramp for customers concerned about lock-in. Yes, really. We have big customers that demand this, and we have had big customers that actually did move off Cloudflare by switching to workerd on their own servers. It makes business sense for us to support this because otherwise we couldn't win those big customers in the first place.