This "predicament" is interesting to me, but not for the reasons that a lot of commenters are pointing out. Previously I didn't understand why someone would lic

This "predicament" is interesting to me, but not for the reasons that a lot of commenters are pointing out. Previously I didn't understand why someone would license their open source project under a BSD-like agreement as opposed to GPL. On the surface, it looks like you're completely giving away control of the work you've done, and that the only beneficiaries in the deal are those who aren't doing the work. This situation made me realize the possibilities that a BSD-like license offers to both the original authors and subsequent contributors. If the project is interesting enough, it is feasible that multiple contributors could get hired by different companies to work on proprietary forks of the original BSD project, possibly with some kind of initial "payout" for signing a non-compete. This seems to be a much better alternative to the GPL model, where the main alternatives are consulting, selling documentation, hoping for enough donation money to support you, or (the longshot) getting hired by a company which uses the project to continue open source development, bug fixes, and in-house modifications.