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Some companies contribute to LLVM or FreeBSD because they are users of this software and sharing development costs with others benefits them. The story could b

• dragonwriter 14y ago
  > Some companies contribute to LLVM or FreeBSD because they are users of this software and sharing development costs with others benefits them. The story could be different if they were in the business of selling closed-source compilers or OS's. SQLite project (public domain, which is pretty much equivalent to permissive open source) gets lots of support from people selling closed source work incorporating it. So does BSD-licensed PostgreSQL. There's actually a lot more incentive for commercial downstream players to contribute to a permissive open source project than a GPL one -- particularly a GPL one that is run by a commercial player and has a copyright assignment requirement. > Linux started as a poor man's clone of Unix but it took off because due to GPL there was no business in fragmenting and killing it. I thin the GPL was more important when Linux was first taking off than it is now, because the viability of F/OSS and its utility to commercial players had to be proven, so a license which compelled people distributing work to make it available under similar terms was necessary. But that's been done now. The case has been made.