

It depends on what type of licensing. One way it could be beneficial to them (and this is me purely speculating with no checking) is that any work done from outside of their company on their code base is basically free labor. Yeah, they’ll lose some potential revenue from people running their own instances of the code, but most people will use their app.
The article isn’t clear enough about this. This pump is nowhere close to the fires, and the water coming out of the pump doesn’t get anywhere close to the fires, either.
The purpose of the pumps is to take water from rivers and send it to wealthy farmers. The farmers didn’t even need the water, anyway, this time of year.