There was a time when it seemed inconceivable that developers would be motivated to release code under MIT or BSD style licenses that lacked the "viral" distrib

There was a time when it seemed inconceivable that developers would be motivated to release code under MIT or BSD style licenses that lacked the "viral" distribution obligations of the GPL. Back then, it seemed obvious that a healthy open source community was going to need to force "borrowers" of the code to contribute their improvements in order to avoid freeloading. However, the reality is that plenty of healthy open source communities exist on MIT style licenses and even include corporate community members who are willing to subsidize improvements that get merged into the public editions. In this way, the "failure" of GPL is a story about people behaving well as a community without needing to have legal whips cracked at them