Or, if it's GPL, you won't take it, and you will write your own in-house version which you'll never release. That is the more likely scenario.
You're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy. If a company that's adamant against open-sourcing their work can't use a GPL solution, they're not going to shrug their shoulders, use it anyway, and then release their changes. They're going to spend more money on an in-house solution because they have complete control over it and know it won't bite them in the ass in the future.
> Or, if it's GPL, you won't take it, and you will write your own in-house version which you'll never release.
Yes, that's why I said "probably", not "definitely". It's misleading to ignore both possibilities and pretend that only one will ever happen. That's why I made my original post.
> You're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy.
Only if you misread my post.
> If a company that's adamant against open-sourcing their work can't use a GPL solution, they're not going to shrug their shoulders, use it anyway, and then release their changes.
If they're "adamant against open-sourcing their work", then by definition they will never open source anything. So? That's not the type of corporation I was talking about in my post.
I didn't. I was contriving a hypothetical to illustrate how the GPL can produce a positive result in some cases that BSD-like licenses cannot. That's why I started my post with "Let me contrive a hypothetical".
I even explicitly pointed this out at the end of my post by saying, "Note that I'm not saying GPL is always the best option and BSD is always worse. I'm just pointing out that, in your previous post, you miss out on one of the advantages of the GPL: it can encourage the release of open source code that otherwise would not have happened."
I did this because I knew that otherwise someone would misinterpret my post as saying the GPL is universally perfect in all situations, or that the situation I described in my contrived hypothetical was the only possible situation that could ever occur. I'm not sure how I could have made that more clear.
> > That's not the type of corporation I was talking about in my post.
> Then what did you mean by:
> > Imagine you're a ruthless corporation and you don't care at all about the open source community.
A ruthless corporation that doesn't care about the open source community (which I think describes most corporations, FWIW) is very different than "a company that's adamant against open-sourcing". The former will contribute open source code when it is in their economic best interest, but they won't go out of their way to play nice with the open source folks. The latter will sacrifice their economic interests just to stick to their ideology.
> A ruthless corporation that doesn't care about the open source community (which I think describes most corporations, FWIW) is very different than "a company that's adamant against open-sourcing". The former will contribute open source code when it is in their economic best interest, but they won't go out of their way to play nice with the open source folks. The latter will sacrifice their economic interests just to stick to their ideology.
If they don't want to contribute any coding work back to the community at large, then let them start from scratch and build something they have full control over. I don't see why the open-source community should have to accommodate them if they're not going to contribute back to that community.
You're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy. If a company that's adamant against open-sourcing their work can't use a GPL solution, they're not going to shrug their shoulders, use it anyway, and then release their changes. They're going to spend more money on an in-house solution because they have complete control over it and know it won't bite them in the ass in the future.