Microsoft has not became dominant because they got a freebee or two from BSD. This is exactly the point - try imagine some evil company today grabbing Apache co

Microsoft has not became dominant because they got a freebee or two from BSD. This is exactly the point - try imagine some evil company today grabbing Apache code-base and starting a commercial branch of it. So what? They will fail against Apache proper, as ESR points out. Let me try to argue not from ideological (closed source being immoral etc.) but from the economic point of view. We are talking about commoditization of software here. There are two types of software - one that contains competitive advantage for the business, and one that is a commodity. And software has a tendency to migrate from the first bucket to the second very fast. And by the way, 'commodity' is not a bad word. Software may be very smart and complicated, but it would not be unique in what it does. For example, if you have written the first social network software -- you have something unique and you'd be mad to open source it straight away (or you'd be very passionate about software freedom, like RMS :) . But when there appear tens of social network apps floating around, you should act like ning and give away your software for free. Why? This seems to be the rational choice for commodity software. To become king of commodities you have to compete on price. 'Free' is the ultimate winner price. And MIT license is the ultimate free license (less restrictions than GPL). When your free application grabs large enough slice of market share (mind share) it will start paying for itself in many ways. It 'develops and tests itself', it provides free marketing for you etc. And you are free to build another unique value-adding application on top of this commodity layer. So, for example, 37signals are very happy with RoR being free and under MIT license. They are using it for their in-house proprietary webapps, while it is being developed and tested now to the large extend by the community. I am sure 37signals would be ecstatic if Microsoft decided to 'grab' Ruby on Rails and integrate it into their next OS.