>>As a result, proprietary software essentially has an unlimited money cheat that they can use to plow into further development until greed starts seriously deg

>>As a result, proprietary software essentially has an unlimited money cheat that they can use to plow into further development until greed starts seriously degrading the quality of software. >Copyleft solves this. The problem is permissive licenses that lack copyleft, allowing privatization of codebases. Copyleft only partially solves the problem. A company with enough resources can give you the code and you still can't effectively fork it unless you are also running a huge company, because making an incompatible product that lacks updates would be unacceptable. Other times, companies are so big that they essentially drive a whole open source ecosystem. Look at IBM's disproportionate influence on Linux. We certainly appreciate their contributions but many people disagree about the direction IBM has chosen, and their choices affect everyone because apps are usually built to cater to the lowest common denominator. Another good example is Chromium. That project is copyleft but nobody wants an old out of date web browser because of security concerns. Even Microsoft could not keep up with their feature development so they forked it. But how different is their fork really? If they are to take code from upstream, it can't be very different.