[ysapir]

"The company is much more likely to work with the open-source developers"

This is an understatement. When you work with an open-source third-party library/module in a commercial company, it is much easier for the company to submit bugfix patches to the open source developers. The company probably has access to a wider range of data (including proprietary client data that can't be released) but which will highlight hard to find bugs. The code is open source so it can debug the problem itself. But even if it is MIT/BSD/Apache/etc, it makes more sense for the company to send back the patches to be integrated. Otherwise, it has to maintain an unreleased patch-list and re-apply it with every version update. If it does not apply cleanly, it has to spend resources to update the patch to the changes in the new version. It's developer time the company can use for better things.

Knowing this is one more reason I am also more likely to choose code released under a permissive license than under GPL. I figure all things being equal, it is probably better tested, better code.

[kostya-kow]

>The code is open source so it can debug the problem itself. But even if it is MIT/BSD/Apache/etc, it makes more sense for the company to send back the patches to be integrated. Otherwise, it has to maintain an unreleased patch-list and re-apply it with every version update. If it does not apply cleanly, it has to spend resources to update the patch to the changes in the new version. It's developer time the company can use for better things.

It would be much easier for those companies to contribute upstream, instead of abusing loopholes in GPL.