[mcdonje]

>The drawback of building commercially on top of open source software using GPL is that the copyleft aspect can put some people off. Not every person or business wants to have to expose their code for every minor change or bug fix they may add...

That's the entire point of copyleft licenses. Businesses want to benefit from the community without giving back.

[fancyfredbot]

Copyleft doesn't seem to cause businesses to give more back, but does seem to prevent them from benefiting from the community, which is a shame.

[mcdonje]

It doesn't prevent them from benefiting from the community. They're deciding they don't want to be beholden to a license that requires them to contribute back, and they're blaming the license itself for their selfishness.

[ryukafalz]

How many drivers are available as FOSS in the Linux kernel? Now how many drivers for the same hardware are available as FOSS for Windows?

Do you think so many of those Linux drivers would have their code available if the kernel weren't copyleft licensed?

[fancyfredbot]

I wasn't thinking of hardware vendors, but you are right that here the copyleft license works well. The reason I think is that in this case the companies are making their money from selling hardware not drivers.