It's in the best interest of a large company to contribute until the project gains a large userbase willing to pay for extra features, while selling forks (with added proprietary features).
Then a company quietly pulls out of upstream development to focus on developing and selling their fork. Chain reaction and the other companies quickly follow the example.
Customers trusted that they were using a "mostly" Open Source project but suddenly end up having to choose between proprietary products with an open core.
If he went along with his product being forced to be open, what then? It still has your name associated with it, he might still sell some copies. I'm just not getting the principles.
it's not the first time I see that, at my previous company, a guy took most of my in-house (closed source) middleware layers and was selling them as a 'product' as is on the interweb.
People would rather be objectively worse off rather than feel that they had been taken advantage of.
If we look at it from a utilitarian perspective having someone who didn't add much capture all of the commercial value seems to be pretty poor. If the feature he was adding was worthwhile I bet he could have been honest and convinced people to pay him to add it. Everyone would have benefited and paying him would have been worthwhile and necessary because while he couldn't have legally kept it closed source, he didn't have to write or release it at all.
I don't know. For such a complex project like linux you can't do all by yourself and you most likely want all the improvements and extensions done by other people.
To be able to incorporate all these changes you have to keep your code base compatible and the easiest way to do this is to give back your changes.
But even if this seems to be the most sensible way to go, an other license might have allowed people to be a lot more unreasonable.
On the other hand a lot of WiFi router vendors violate the GPL by not releasing the code and contribute nothing back to Linux.
NetApp is a very good example, as they contribute NFS code back to Linux but not FreeBSD.
Why do you think that might be ?
Literally every company you mentioned contributes code to FreeBSD, so what are you even talking about[1][2][3]?
[1]: https://freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=netapp
[2]: https://freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=emc
[3]: https://freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=iXsystems
Hint, shitty little few line fixes != contributing back.
What a disingenuous response, Linux does not have the WAFL Filesystem and so why point out wether FreeBSD has it or not. Also NetAPP released Bhyve and EMC Isilon has made over 4000 commits to the FreeBSD tree, those are serious contributions regardless off what you say.
As a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy board you should seriously stop spreading Misinformation and being so dismissive of other FLOSS projects.
And one counter-example isn't enough refutation.
not saying i believe either of you. just saying, language matters.
For me, GPL doesn't go nearly far enough, and I licence everything I write under AGPL.
How is the contribution process organized? How willing are the developers to incorporate foreign extensions?
There a quite a few factors that determine how such big projects work and at the end it's IMHO always the people involved that make the difference.
I'm sure that if Linux wasn't GPL, you'd have 'vendors' selling 'HP Linux' and 'Corp Linux' to their locked in customers in no time at all. The only reason Linux grew up to this point is that the vendors are forced to contribute back and cooperate (up to a point). Mind you it might also be the reason Linux is so bloated these days, but at least there is no vendor lock in...
As a small example, someone decided a few years back to release a "Arduino UI" over my own simavr[0] as an indigogo project. ie trying to be paid to package a demo I made (for free): he had screenshots, a few promises and no source code. I managed to email the guy telling him I wanted to see the source code of the whole lot and somehow, the project fizzed out.
If my project had been BSD, I might have seen someone making money from my project and associate my name with something that I had zero control on. When I give a project away, I want it to stay free for use, and I really hate to see 'packagers' who don't contribute anything at all move over and try to monetize it.
Same story as when I released freewares a few years back, I had a note saying it was NOT ok to package it on 'CDs' sold around.
[0]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr