On Wed, 2011-01-05 at 13:49 +0530, steve wrote:
In an ideal world the other person would contribute the improvements back without having to be legally obligated to do so (as in the case of GPL), however in the BSD world this does not happen as often as it should (ask the BSD folk what they gained from Apple and M$ copying their code and improving on it).
why harp on apple and M$? no one expects anything from them. Regardless of license they will find a way of perverting everything - look at the lakhs of ordinary contributors who contribute back - look at django or jquery.
This is not to say that the other people copying/forking /never/ submit back -- it does happen -- with GPL tho' making it a legal obligation ensures that it always happens.
not necessarily - a lot of people just do not touch GPL code - they prefer to contribute code to projects with a more free license.