The GPL an unpleasant side-effect: it encourages companies to pay lip service to community involvement and to be seen as "community leaders". If you go to any

The GPL an unpleasant side-effect: it encourages companies to pay lip service to community involvement and to be seen as "community leaders". If you go to any major conference now, you can't have a beer in peace without someone from one of these super-open companies trying to tell you how super-excited they are to drive innovation as part of a thriving community or whatever other cliche is popular nowadays. In the meantime, though... Most companies that don't give a shit about community and openness can keep their BSD code tucked away. For most companies that try to make money out of GPL software, not giving a shit about community and openness is usually a bad PR move, so there's a great incentive for pushing as much of what you do as far upstream as possible. You'd think really bad patches would get rejected (and more often than not I guess they do), but in many cases, the project leader(s) work for the same company as the guys sending the shitty pages, and of course they get integrated, because $company $qualifier Linux $latest_version + 1 needs to ship this June and the feature has already been announced. Whole projects, or at least major modules/sub-project, are effectively a one-company show or an internal playground. This isn't bad because companies are scary, it's bad because, while the code is out in the open, the agenda and the planning processes aren't, and it fractures the community a lot. It's a good part of how projects like PulseAudio and systemd ended up with a bad name: everyone can agree that they at least offer some useful features (some people would go as far as to say they're "much-needed improvements", but that's far more debatable than whether per-application volume setting is useful), but they were pushed way, way before they were ready for production, and everyone saw this as Red Hat's attempt to enroll everyone into their beta testing program. In many other cases, commercial involvement in GPL projects is pretty much of no value. They publish the changes because they're required to, but most of the code is so brain-damaged it can't be used upstream, or is just a GPL-licensed interface over a proprietary library, a la nVidia. I'm guilty of having written both types of code, on several occasions, so it's not like I'm really just a BSD user for whom the grapes are too sour. There's also the fun crowd that's using outdated, unsupported stuff on their rootfs because the project switched to GPLv3 six years ago. They really, really like not having to pay money for 99% of the software on their device, but they really, really REALLY like making sure you can't flash their devices with your own firmware, so they can't do GPLv3. Of course, the old branch no longer gets bugfixes or security updates, so their flashy gadget will fall flat on its head as soon as it's exposed to an Internet, but that's ok, you'll buy a new one next year anyway. 20 years ago I was really, really happy when I heard that some company was licensing something under GPL, or contributing to a GPL project. Nowadays, frankly, I'm more scared than happy. There have been success stories, but they're getting fewer and fewer.