"The Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) has been around in one form or another since the Gnu manifesto published by Richard Stallman in 1985. The free software movement founded at that time has not simply created the most successful copyright licence ever, it has acted as a guide to other, similar movements..."

I do understand why companies often prefer BSD and Apache products to the GPL. But what I don't understand is why companies prefer proprietary over GPL.

Is it reasonable to raise the question "does X still matter?" when the X in question is in use among nearly two-thirds of the target users under discussion?

The submission by Microsoft of twenty thousand lines of code to the Kernel has, predictably, caused many an eyebrow to arch. The phrase "beware Greeks bearing gifts" comes swiftly to mind.

Microsoft has donated some drivers to Linux. It's to their advantage to do so. This isn't code to make Linux better in some way that benefits everyone.

Contributing to projects that use more permissive licences than the GNU GPL means that it is likely that many will not contribute because of their distaste for free riders.

"In one of RIAA’s high profile cases the Free Software Foundation backed defendant Joel Tenenbaum, much to the dislike of the music industry lobby. John Sullivan, Operations Manager at the FSF explains in a guest post why they think these cases impact not just music, but also free software and its technology..."

"The problem with the Ruby on Rails community isn’t simply sexism, unprofessionalism, or ghetto-ism, but that Rails is, at its core, a culture which values individual ego more than community..." -- N.B: Rinari: Ruby on Rails Minor Mode for Emacs