The point of my post is that in practice these companies donated their effort to an apache project rather than building their own as it provided trust that lice

The point of my post is that in practice these companies donated their effort to an apache project rather than building their own as it provided trust that licenses would not become too unfavorable in the future and adoption cheaper adoption path to traditional data centers. In practice if Cloudera decided to they could fork hadoop to create "cloudoop" or otherwise stop submitting patches upstream and hadoop development would considerably slow. Given the nature of software, slow development is often equivalent to reverse development as dependencies fall out of date and the project becomes abandoned.