I think this is about GPL project(s) reaching a critical mass.
Companies obviously prefer BSD... until the competing GPL project(s) become so successful they can't avoid it any more.
Every time a company exerts its short term BSD right not to contribute back they indirectly help the GPL competition if any. And since companies' "vision" never sees further than a couple of years...
Posted Nov 14, 2012 16:52 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
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I'm not sure that companies do prefer BSD licensing. BSD licensing is great if your goal is to make something popular to gain networking effects (e.g. media codecs) or if you're a big player and want to be able to build proprietary systems off the code base. But the GPL seems to be better for the case where you have lots of companies involved, none of which is big enough to dominate the market. The enforced share and share alike provisions of the GPL give companies the reassurance that they aren't going to be taken advantage of by a competitor who uses their contributions while keeping their own improvements proprietary.
Crowding out OpenBSD
Posted Dec 5, 2012 8:23 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
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The primary examples here being Apple and Google, you really outperform the sum of all counter examples...
Crowding out OpenBSD
Posted Nov 16, 2012 15:07 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
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> until the competing GPL project(s) become so successful they can't avoid it any more.
Unless you're Google. Cf. the largish parts of Linux infrastructure that were rewrittten to be without GPL in Android.