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by belorn 3018 days ago
The only companies that can follow a policy of license purity and waste money rewriting code is those companies that live in markets with very little competition. The more harsh the competition is the more agile the company need to be in reducing cost and using any free code that help create the product while keeping to your core business model.

For example, game developers will use any code that don't conflict with the model of selling copies under exclusive rights. Blizzard Entertainment which is currently one of the largest game developer studio in the world has used everything from LGPLv3 to custom permission granted by free software developers. Having a lawyer read a standard license and evaluate if it can be used is much cheaper than pushing the release date on a game a few months further, not counting the additional cost of having to write your own XML parser, html, javascript, fonts, or what have you. It also the reason why game studio are willing to pay a lot of money for third-party libraries with extensively custom written restrictive licenses. So long it fit the business model, and it save money and time, then using it is a competitive advantage in a industry that is heavily over saturated.