I would say copyleft licenses can even be better for a business, since they make sure, that competitors cannot grab and run, but need to contribute back. Businesses just need to understand, that copyleft also applies to the competition, when they use copyleft licensed projects.
It's rare that this weighs heavily compared to the administrative burden of complying with the GPL. Most open-source code (especially things like coreutils) is effectively commons: something which many companies rely on but doesn't represent a competitive edge to them. So there's already a strong incentive to contribute upstream: it's easier than trying to maintain your own fork. A competitor hoarding their own contributions is more likely to be shooting themselves in the foot than giving themselves an edge.
Agreed, and as a friend pointed out to me years ago, there's nothing stopping people who author GPLd code from making it clear that if a corporation wants a different licensing arrangement for something that's under GPL, they're perfectly capable of negotiating that with the author and paying for it.
That this doesn't happen often shows the motivation of most companies using open source is ultimately ... just looking for free work.
> That this doesn't happen often shows the motivation of most companies using open source is ultimately ... just looking for free work.
Entering into contracts is really annoying. Companies don't just hand out checks, they have accountants who ask "what is this for, how is it being spent, how do we pay taxes on it", etc. "Pay this random developer that you have no pre-existing relationship with" is not as trivial as it sounds.
There’s also “how do we know they’ll be around three years from now for support?”. Working with a company feels more secure in that respect, especially if that company is large and reasonably old.
The “this” in “That this doesn't happen often” can also refer to “people who author GPLd code from making it clear that if a corporation wants a different licensing arrangement” not happening very often.
Yes, there are projects that explicitly mention it, but I think those are in the minority.
This can only happen if they are truly making the project only themselves and accepting external contributions only via a CLA—and I expect the mere existence of CLA to reduce the amount of external contributions in itself.
