>The main difference is in the small cases where there is enough community interest to actually take a company's internal patches and do the work of cleaning th

>The main difference is in the small cases where there is enough community interest to actually take a company's internal patches and do the work of cleaning them up to get them upstream. Exactly. It's also why the argument that open source has an advantage because many eyes can look at the code is also a mostly empty promise, and why things like Heartbeat happened despite everyone knowing the criticality of code like OpenSSL being absolutely solid. If you don't have enough of the right people looking at the right code then you get things like Heartbeat. I'm not pointing this out to argue that Open Source is worthless, but rather to encourage people to not get complacent - Open Source is not a panacea and should still be vetted as you would vet any other part of your solution. >So the result is that, in practice, companies contribute back to GPL-licensed projects for the same reason they contribute back to BSD-licensed projects: because they want to be able to pull in new code from the upstream, and having to rebase a patchqueue every time they want new upstream features is more expensive than engaging with the maintainers to contribute their own code back. You mean people act in favor of their own enlightened self interests? Who could have guess that? Ham fisted attempts to force people to do the right "moral" thing rarely succeed. But we have people who insist "if we just had a better policy!". Sigh. Think of how much more productive we could collectively be if we stopped worrying about how to control other people, but instead structure our approaches to influence their inherent behaviors to get the better outcome naturally? And if they still go their own way shrug and go on? The GPL has evolved into a beast that would make the most aggressive HOA blush - yet the same people who would rightly go after a busybody HOA have no problem cheering misguided efforts like GPL 3 on? It's pretty amazing.