> Licenses like the MIT and BSD license exist for a different reason. And that reason is to give people who want to share what they did on generous terms a way to do so. And historically this was done in the belief that enlightened users would see it as being in their interest to contribute back.
I think the thing that people ignore is that there's a huge incentive to contribute back with licenses like MIT/BSD. The incentive is not having to maintain a set of patches and an in-house fork. Proprietary forks can be expensive (an engineer will have to apply those patches every release -- and engineers are expensive. Not to mention the good ones won't want this kind of work.)
The notion of a company taking a BSD-licensed product and taking it to market while leaving the creator out in the cold seems rare. I won't say it never happens, but for most companies it makes economic sense to contribute back.
It makes economic sense... if you plan to ever update the software (especially more than a small handful of times). For most software, that's a pretty sane assumption, but there's a fairly important niche where it's not: embedded firmware, all the way from the GUI of some random thing-with-a-cheap-LCD to device drivers for flagship Android phones (which are more likely to be in the "small handful" category than "never", but still). In the latter case, even though Linux is under the GPL, at the rate the hardware changes there is often little incentive to contribute back to mainline. Or fulfill GPL obligations at all, for that matter - but at least most big Western manufacturers have some place to get a source dump. If Linux were BSD-licensed, things would be even worse.
On the contrary, out of all the free OSes out there, it was Linux with GPL the most successful, because companies could contribute back knowing that their competitors would not take the code and run away and produce proprietary forks backed by large marketings budgets.
See FreeBSD and Mac OS. If I contribute to Darwin, Apple will take my changes to improve their product. I get nothing in return. This may be fine for an individual, but for a company who depends on a product, it's a bad scenario.
I think the thing that people ignore is that there's a huge incentive to contribute back with licenses like MIT/BSD. The incentive is not having to maintain a set of patches and an in-house fork. Proprietary forks can be expensive (an engineer will have to apply those patches every release -- and engineers are expensive. Not to mention the good ones won't want this kind of work.)
The notion of a company taking a BSD-licensed product and taking it to market while leaving the creator out in the cold seems rare. I won't say it never happens, but for most companies it makes economic sense to contribute back.