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Trolling aside, the freedom allowed to not show all of your cards that MIT/MSD/Apache allows is better for business, and if the app is essential to their busine

Trolling aside, the freedom allowed to not show all of your cards that MIT/MSD/Apache allows is better for business, and if the app is essential to their business then they will contribute fixes back upstream. An example is Juniper and their myriad contributions to FreeBSD. This allows Juniper to pull down upstream updates without it being a complete goat-rope to integrate with their own secret sauce code; if Juniper were using Linux instead of FreeBSD then anyone could demand full source code and sell knock-off solutions based on Juniper's work and the result would be less actual development of the technology (for lack of profit motive).

geofft 9y ago
That shows that it is better for some businesses, which no one disputes. For other businesses, the compulsion for others to share their work results in a better product, and tbeir profit motives are more aligned with a better product in an absolute sense than being better than competitors, and so being compelled to release source is a worthwhile tradeoff for everyone else doing so too.