The idea that there should be no issue sharing them is absurd. Yeah just publish the minutes from your marketing strategy meetings as well while you’re at it. Invite your competitors to go over your books with you and your accountant and then arrange meet and greets with your most profitable customers as dessert.
In all seriousness, I'm OK with that as long as people are honest about it. Just say "We track our users to collect business intelligence." and I'm happy.
While I agree with the spirit of your comment, this is a very sweeping generalization. Many kinds of financial information are being shared regularly with the public and for publicly traded companies they're required by law. Many companies build their infrastructure on open source software, with proprietary glue being a small percent.
Knowing what you can or even should share (for marketing purposes) is crucial. Especially knowing that keeping information asymmetry forever is impossible.
This too is a sweeping generalization ;), a good one though. We're pretty fortunate to have a lot of our building blocks made using open source software. Boost libraries to openssl, most of the stack is open source including the programming language. Although, the proprietary glue is the important bit.
An architect's work is more than just bricks and mortar.
Basically whatever process you put in place to level the playing field, big businesses will find a way to game it to their advantage because they have the resources to do so and the deep pockets that allow them to take risks.
It's a way to level the playing field. The idea is that, if everyone has access to all the data, then there's more opportunity to make all business more efficient, whereas if some businesses hold information about the market and costumers for themselves, then they get to be sloppier in their implementation because they are already so far in the game.