alt Hacker NewsIt's game theory. If you don't have market share for your closed model, you release it as open source and let a community build upon it.
Mochi is better positioned to build tools on top of their community model. They're already thinking about control.
Weights are commodity. Products have value.
You said yourself that you don't think proprietary tools can compete with the open source stack, so which is it? If Comfy is as good as or better than any paid frontend that Mochi themselves can come up with then there's absolutely no reason for anyone to give Mochi any money under their current license model.
Stability was supposed to be doing a similar "give away the models but sell products built on them" strategy and it doesn't seem to be working for them, by all accounts they're barely able to keep the lights on.