One pattern I have seen a few times is that a company develops some important internal piece of software and then later the opens the source code (normally moti

One pattern I have seen a few times is that a company develops some important internal piece of software and then later the opens the source code (normally motivated by the notion that other people will contribute to it - which they rarely do). What normally happens next that the company loses control of this software which they probably didn't realise was so important to their core business as the employees who worked on it are empowered move to other companies and develop private forks or start up as a micro-ISV/contractor business based around providing private forks of the software to clients. I think what people don't realise is that most of the legal structure around open source software is for software used by end-users. For internal software the GPL doesn't function in the same way: other organisations are more than able to keep private forks and realise all the benefit of the software without contributing back.