I think at the end of the day the reason that the opensourced DeepSeek is because they are programmers. Programmers like to show people the cool stuff they did. I had a boss who was rich enough to retire but was working three jobs because programming is cool and fun and he wants to do cool and fun things and show people the stuff that he did.

Everybody is trying to come up with a money related reason for why they open sourced it but at the end of the day the people who made it are engineers and not buisnesspeople. DeepSeek is really freaking cool, and they wanted to show people the cool thing they did.