Exactly. I guess the license doesn't really matter a lot in this case, as long as it's some sort of Open Source license. The benefit the companies have by getti

Exactly. I guess the license doesn't really matter a lot in this case, as long as it's some sort of Open Source license. The benefit the companies have by getting their patches merged back in is that they don't necessarily have to maintain the patches themselves anymore. The GPL, however, should not have any effect on that, as long as the work is used internally only.